The orderly flow of information around the globe depends a lot on security, and at the heart of that security is randomness.
Modern-day encryption relies on unpredictability to avoid being cracked, and the most powerful form of unpredictability is randomness. And in a new study, researchers describe a new way to amplify that randomness.
Random number generators have been around for years, but they often have subtle imperfections that cause patterns to emerge. And even powerful computers are saddled with this liability purely because they use traditional transistors to generate the binary code—1’s and 0’s—that enables computers to store data and make calculations.
“Any conventional electronic device like a phone or a computer is completely deterministic, so it’s actually very difficult for a computer or any other electronic device to generate a random value,” says Renato Renner, a physics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) and a member of the research team. “It cannot just toss a coin because everything that goes on in the scale of the logic is basically completely predictable.”
While these numbers may seem random at first glance, a quantum computer would be able to recognize even the most obscure patterns and thus crack the code.
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