It may be a decade or more before quantum computers become common enough that we’ll find out whether “post-quantum cryptography” will stand up to genuine quantum computers. In the meantime, some ...

Research presented at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week revealed that the Linux software used by the most widely used random-number generators does not spit out ...

The Energy Department has technology that can generate random number sequences, and now it wants to commercialize it. It’s incredibly difficult to create a truly random sequence of numbers—often ...

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 ...

Random number sequences are essential to a host of encryption schemes. But true randomness in the strict sense is not possible in the classical world; it only occurs in quantum-mechanical processes.

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 ...

Before computers and algorithms were developed to generate random numbers, there were dice. Middle Eastern tombs uncovered cubical dice dating back to the 20th century BC—but it’s believed they’re ...

In 2019, the "blockchain bandits" were able to steal over $54 million in cryptocurrency thanks to the predictability of "random" number generation. While the probability of guessing a randomly ...

Random numbers are increasingly important to our digitally connected world, with applications that include e-commerce, cryptography, and cloud computing. Producing a large amount of truly random ...