Generating a string of random numbers is easy. The hard part is proving that they’re random. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams once pointed out, “that’s the problem with randomness: you can never be sure ...

Following a public comment period and review, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has removed a cryptographic algorithm from its draft guidance on random number generators.

NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has formally removed Dual_EC_DRBG from its draft guidance on random number generators. This is ...

In September 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that American and British intelligence agencies had successfully cracked much of the online encryption internet users used to keep their ...

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 ...

Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an ...

To simulate chance occurrences, a computer can’t literally toss a coin or roll a die. Instead, it relies on special numerical recipes for generating strings of shuffled digits that pass for random ...