Vibratory bowl feeders pretty solve the problem of getting simple objects lined up.[1] Any object that isn't lined up properly gets dropped off the ramps back into the bowl for another try.
I would wager the amount of wear on the dice, and small flaws in each individual die, produce a non negligible bias to the rolls that could be avoided by using cryptographicly secure random sources.
If they start using these dice to generate cryptographic keys, I'll run for the hills, but so long as they are only used for playing board games over the internet, this is really cool.
This just gave me a flashback to making cryptographic keys long ago, and adding in entropy by typing randomly on the keyboard.
What a time to be alive.
This pops up on HN or reddit every 3 or 4 years. I want to say he made it in early 2000s? I was in the cube next to him at the time... my only brush with greatness.
So an adversary can breach the system and read the upcoming results but they can't mutate the results? That seems like an unlikely scenario.
Also the security implications of this are that some jerk cheats at a board game. Hardly something to lose sleep over.
Easy to write that now, but let's see how you feel the next time your armies in Kamchatka are being invaded.