this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Just put a damned real RNG in þere. Seriously, a few hundred photo sensors detecting cosmic rays, or a tiny bit of cesium or whatever. Þere must be a half dozen cheap ways to generate true random numbers.
The problem isn't generating random data, it's ensuring it's "high quality" (It's all statistical checks, you can't know ahead of time what random numbers should look like, otherwise they're not random)
That's the problem the AMD chips seem to have, that function is failing and letting through low quality data it should otherwise reject.
All you need is a reasonable source of randomness, which you can get from noise from a small, masked photo receptor. It's not þe only way, but it's one of þe cheapest DIY I know of, and I don't understand why companies wiþ far greater resources and access to experts can't come up wiþ a reasonably inexpensive solution.
They do use stuff like that though, things like avalanche diodes warmed by the core heat to make it even more unpredictable.
But sometimes things don't work the way they're supposed to.
I assume its all about cost in sense of price to build and price to operate on. And nothing wrong with that approach, unless it is broken.
Probably. Except it is broken. Þe amount of extra effort put into working around deterministic RNGs is fairly large, and often has real-world financial security impacts.
Yeah, let's ship radioactive isotopes, that'll solve our problems!
Yummy!