Generating true random numbers is a rather difficult problem and usually requires some extra hardware. Typical random numbers generated by computers are only psuedorandom and while this is typically good enough for most applications. They are obviously less than desirable for sensitive or important applications.

It turns out, however, that you can generate true random numbers with just the hardware available on nearly all computing devices! It involves profiling the bit states of memory after power cycles and figuring out things from this which also lets you fingerprint a system from this information. There’s more of a discussion here and the in depth paper is available here for those who want to read it.

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