Cracking Golang's PRNG for Fun and (Virtual) Profit

willyschultz.com

6 points·willycodes··3 comments

This may be an interesting article; however, I stopped reading when I discovered that it is about math/rand and not crypt/rand. Any PRNG that is not cryptographically secure must be flawed by definition (otherwise it would qualify as a crypto PRNG, right?) and should only be used for tasks where the quality of the randomness is only secondary.

> The given seed argument is being taken modulo _M = (1 << 31) - 1 which is equivalent to . So even though the seed argument is given as a 64-bit integer, only 31 bits of it are actually used. In other words, there are only unique seeds

Why is JavaScript being used to insert constants into the text? I believe that 'equivalent to .' should be 'equivalent to $SOMENUM.' and that 'only unique' should be 'only $OTHERNUM unique' instead.

The whole article (which is definitely interesting) is like this: numbers are omitted, presumably because there's some JavaScript inserting them.

Probably the culprit is

>> <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.1/MathJax... type="text/javascript"></script>

Mathjax is usefull to add formulas, specially in pages with a lot of integrals, square roots or matrices. In this case it's a too powerful tool, but I guess that the author just uses it in every article.

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