Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance in cryptography. If a series of pseudorandom numbers can be trivially replicated by figuring out the counter and hash algorithm (seems simple with open source software), how can the psuedorandom numbers be said to be of high quality?

View on HN

The key(s) used for the cipher would need to be randomly seeded in some way that an attacker could not easily guess (e.g. with a different CSPRNG).

Edit: And for hash functions, you can generate some random bytes that you append the counter to before putting it through the hash algorithm. The same as above, if those bytes are hard to guess then the construction should be safe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com