Experimental result : Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Persi Diaconis. The …

This is a fun challenge: The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who …

Cryptographic flaws still matter. Here’s a flaw in the random-number generator used to create private keys. The seed has only 32 bits of entropy. Seems like this flaw is being exploited in the wild. [...]

Many years ago, Matt Blaze and I talked about getting our hands on a casino-grade automatic shuffler and looking for vulnerabilities. We never did it—I remember that we didn’t even try very hard—but this article shows that we probably would have found non-random properties:...the executives …

In kernel version 5.17, both /dev/random and /dev/urandom have been replaced with a new — identical — algorithm based on the BLAKE2 hash function, which is an excellent security improvement. [...]

Basically, the SafeZone library doesn’t sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. They’re too close to each other, which makes them vulnerable to recovery. There aren’t many weak keys out there, but there are some: So far, Böck has identified only …

We knew the basics of this story, but it’s good to have more detail. Here’s me in 2015 about this Juniper hack. Here’s me in 2007 on the NSA backdoor. [...]

A vulnerability (just patched) in the random number generator used in the Kaspersky Password Manager resulted in easily guessable passwords: The password generator included in Kaspersky Password Manager had several problems. The most critical one is that it used a PRNG not suited for cryptographic purposes. Its single source …

Science has a paper (and commentary ) on generating 250 random terabits per second with a laser. I don’t know how cryptographically secure they are, but that can be cleaned up with something like Fortuna. [...]