Re:Designing a New PRNG
by masklinn on Monday December 20, 2021 @03:50PM
(#29630111)
I think you misread tptacek's line of questioning. It's not about the quality / superiority of what over what, but the initial motivation for rand switching away from PCG:
> This was done after some concerns were raised by the author of xoshiro, who posted a blog entry on PCG and also raised an issue on the possibility of PCG being invertible.
PCG and the XOR family are both non-cryptographic RNGs, how is predictability or invertibility relevant then? If those are concerns, surely a CSPRNG should be used?
The "quality" of randomness is very much a concern in non-secure contexts e.g. patterns in an RNG can bias your simulation, but it doesn't seem like it'd matter if somebody can recover even your simulation seed.
> This was done after some concerns were raised by the author of xoshiro, who posted a blog entry on PCG and also raised an issue on the possibility of PCG being invertible.
PCG and the XOR family are both non-cryptographic RNGs, how is predictability or invertibility relevant then? If those are concerns, surely a CSPRNG should be used?
The "quality" of randomness is very much a concern in non-secure contexts e.g. patterns in an RNG can bias your simulation, but it doesn't seem like it'd matter if somebody can recover even your simulation seed.