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If the PRNG is cryptographically strong, then, by definition, its output cannot be distinguished from random bytes. That's the thought experiment by which a PRNG is supposed to be tested: two black boxes are given to the attacker, one implementing the PRNG, the other producing really random bytes (that one contains a gnome who throws dice real quick). The ...


7

A PRNG can be insecure for several reasons, but one of them is using as seed some data which can have only a limited number of distinct values. For instance, if you use the current time as seed, then that value is known to the attacker, or at least potentially known with a not-so-hard effort: even if you have an internal clock with microsecond precision, and ...


2

Technically, you improve the security a little, but to no useful end. Random numbers usually come from a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that is itself seeded with a random value. The purpose of the PRNG is to stretch the original seed to produce a very long output. Random numbers are usually invoked for two reasons: To create random-looking data ...


1

If the reason the functions are insecure is because you can exhaust the seed space after seeing a very small number of values, then this approach might give the sum of the number of seed bits of security, assuming the seeds were perfectly random. If the problem is that they have a short period, if the functions have pairwise co-prime periods then the period ...



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