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I want to research pseudo random number generators, and I see that a lot of the random number generators are not as secure as people assume.

What I would like to know is what are the most widely used random generators currently ? Be it PRNG or CSPRNG. This is under my assumption that TRNG has not yet become as common as the former generators. I would like to understand how frequently PRNGs are used in security applications, when CSPRNGs should have been used instead.

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    Are non-cryptographic random number generators security-related? This sounds like it might be better for StackOverflow.
    – Macil
    Oct 5, 2017 at 22:15
  • I would say insecure random generators touches the security field. The question however does not seem to be. Oct 5, 2017 at 22:29
  • To be specific - I want to know if non secure PRNG are used widely which in turn will have a hit on security. It is just my thought. If it is not valid then i could just close the question. Sorry new to this section.
    – C0d3ine
    Oct 5, 2017 at 22:47
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    "widely used" will be difficult to define because you can never be assured of a statistically complete sample set. It would be up to guesses or personal experience. The other issue is that you would have to confirm that a widely used RNG is being used for security. This question is one of those situations where the answers might imply a security impact, but the question itself is not about security.
    – schroeder
    Oct 6, 2017 at 9:07

1 Answer 1

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Mersenne Twister is a non-cryptographic RNG that's commonly used in many applications. According to Wikipedia:

The Mersenne Twister is the default PRNG for the following software systems:

Microsoft Visual C++,[3] Microsoft Excel,[4] GAUSS,[5] GLib,[6] GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library,[7] GNU Octave,[8] GNU Scientific Library,[9] gretl,[10] IDL,[11] Julia,[12] CMU Common Lisp,[13] Embeddable Common Lisp,[14] Steel Bank Common Lisp,[15] Maple,[16] MATLAB,[17] Free Pascal,[18] PHP,[19] Python,[20][21] R,[22] Ruby,[23] SageMath,[24] Scilab,[25] Stata.[26] It is also available in Apache Commons,[27] in standard C++ (since C++11),[28][29] and in Mathematica.[30] Add-on implementations are provided in many program libraries, including the Boost C++ Libraries,[31] the CUDA Library,[32] and the NAG Numerical Library.[33]

Mersenne Twister is a very good PRNG, with good statistical properties, very long period, and is fast. Despite being a very good PRNG, and is widely used for many games, statistical simulations, and other purposes, it's not suitable for cryptography.

Another common RNG is linear congruential generator (LCG), which for a long time is the default RNG in popular C libraries (and many other languages that uses C library, such as PHP). LCG is a simple but very poor RNG, even for non-cryptographic RNG standards. Its period size is embarrassingly small, already-produced numbers cannot repeat for the entire period, and it has statistical properties that makes it unsuitable for many purposes.

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