Although schemes to generate random-looking numbers are easy to come up with, assessing their security — the extent to which they are truly unpredictable to a potential adversary — is notoriously ...

Hackers love random numbers, or more accurately, the pursuit of them. It turns out that computers are so good at following our exacting instructions that they are largely incapable of doing anything ...

While world events are often difficult to predict, true randomness is surprisingly hard to find. In recent years, physicists have turned to quantum mechanics for a solution, using the inherently ...

Fast randomness A diagram of the quantum random number generator on the photonic integrated chip. (Courtesy: Bing Bai and Yao Zheng) Smartphones could soon come equipped with a quantum-powered source ...

One of the pieces of equipment for the quantum random number generator in the NIST Boulder laboratories. Very little in this life is truly random. A coin flip is influenced by the flipper’s force, its ...

Randomness rules the very fabric of reality. So it only makes sense that scientists have figured out how to use nature’s randomness as a tool in our mundane world. Random numbers go hand-in-hand with ...

SAN FRANCISCO, RSA Conference -- In light of yet another SSL vulnerability this week, any improvements to the underpinnings of encryption would be welcome. One weakness of encryption algorithms -- one ...