Groundbreaking random number algorithm may be boon for online security

Generating a string of random numbers is easy. The hard part is proving that they’re random. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams once pointed out, “that’s the problem with randomness: you can never be sure.”

While this might sound like the kind of brain-teasers algorithm geeks play around with over a beer on a Friday night, however, it’s not purely an academic problem. When it comes to security, our faith in encryption services relies on people knowing for certain that the long strings of seemingly random numbers generated can’t be decoded by potential adversaries.