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Re:Eight Bits of Trust; eMudhra's CA keys cracked in millise... by echoangle on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @08:26PM (#50189497)
The claim is “if I generate a random number with equal distribution in a gigantic range and get a very tiny number, it’s more likely that there’s a mistake somewhere than that I just got this number randomly”.
Re:Eight Bits of Trust; eMudhra's CA keys cracked in millise... by palata on Thursday October 22, 2026 @06:37AM (#50193554)
Which is... wrong?

If you generate a random number with equal distribution in a gigantic range, 0 is just as likely to happen as any other number in the range, right?

That's the meaning of "equal distribution".

Re:Eight Bits of Trust; eMudhra's CA keys cracked in millise... by echoangle on Thursday October 22, 2026 @10:07AM (#50195524)
I think you misunderstood the point.

In a working RNG, every number has equal probability.

But there's a probability <1 that the RNG is working as it should and a probability >0 that the RNG erroneously generates numbers that aren't equally distributed.

And because the range of possible numbers is so large and the probability of a mistake is not that tiny, a small result is more likely to be an error than a random result that happens to be small.

If I write a program to flip a coin and it generates heads 30 times in a row, is it more likely that this is just a random result or that I made a mistake in my programming?

One probability is 2^30, and the probability that someone makes an error resulting in this pattern is probably higher than 1/2^30.

Re:Eight Bits of Trust; eMudhra's CA keys cracked in millise... by palata on Thursday October 22, 2026 @10:39AM (#50196038)
Right, ok I get it now!