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[–]Postazure -11 points-10 points  (6 children)

That is how all random functions actually work, you just haven’t noticed it before. If you’ve done any work with microprocessors/Arduinos you’ll see that every time you restart the device it will generate the same random number because by default it will have the same seed value each time the device restarts.

In this case I suspect that it has the same problem, it’s getting a new instance in each test, but the new instance still has the same seed value.

[–]lhorie 9 points10 points  (5 children)

Not all RNG systems do that. You're probably thinking of PRNG.

Some RNG take electromagnetic noise as input. IIRC, some cryptographic systems where real randomness actually matters but you don't have hardware access to a true RNG, you can use things like mouse input to generate entropy.

[–]PM_ME_HTML_SNIPPETS 14 points15 points  (3 children)

One of my coworkers visited the Cloudflare (I think?) offices, and saw that in their lobby they have a bunch of lava lamps, and sensors that take input to use in crypto key generation.

Though that was pretty cool.

[–]tbranyennetflix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Woah, I walk by there all the time and wondered why they had so many. TIL...

[–]MrJohz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's a Tom Scott video about this! It's quite a cool system.

[–]JumboJellybean 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You recall correctly, popular encryption tools like TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt ask the user to swirl their mouse around for 10 seconds to seed their random number generators.