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Comment by strenholme

This is why I use, in security critical contents of my software (where the numbers have to be computationally infeasible to produce), a type of random number generator called an XOF (extendable-output function).

It takes entropy from multiple different sources, makes it all input to the XOF, then the XOF uses cryptography to output a stream that has as much entropy as the combined entropy of all of its sources of randomness. So if an XOF, for example, takes 100 runs of rdrand16, along with the system time in microseconds and the number of milliseconds between receiving 100 packets over the network, the XOF will output a completely random stream without artifacts like never returning 0x0000, even if rdrand16 never outputs 0x0000.

parent strenholme 1 month ago

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