Lotteries, accidents and rolls of dice — the world around us is full of unpredictable events. Yet generating a truly random series of numbers for encryption has remained a surprisingly difficult task.

A set of values or elements that is statistically random, but it is derived from a known starting point and is typically repeated over and over. Pseudo-random numbers provide necessary values for ...

You know two-factor authentication tokens, the ephemeral, six-digit numbers you use as a second layer of security when logging into, say, your email? Those constantly updating, randomly generated ...

Whether it’s a game of D&D or encrypting top-secret information, a wide array of methods are available for generating the needed random numbers with high enough entropy for their use case. For a ...

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, catch a tiger by the toe – so the rhyme goes. But even children know that counting-out rhymes like this are no help at making a truly random choice. Perhaps you remember when ...

If your name gets picked for jury duty, it’s because a computer used a random number generator to select it. The same goes for tax audits or when you opt for a quick pick lottery ticket. But how can ...

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 ...

In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we ...

Because computers don't understand words or phrases in the same way people can, they speak a language of their own, using only two symbols: 0 and 1. This computing parlance is known as binary code, ...