Erica Klarreich in Quanta:
Randomness is a source of power. From the coin toss that decides which team gets the ball to the random keys that secure online interactions, randomness lets us make choices that are fair and impossible to predict.
But in many computing applications, suitable randomness can be hard to generate. So instead, programmers often rely on things called hash functions, which swirl data around and extract some small portion in a way that looks random. For decades, many computer scientists have presumed that for practical purposes, the outputs of good hash functions are generally indistinguishable from genuine randomness — an assumption they call the random oracle model.
“It’s hard to find today a cryptographic application… whose security analysis does not use this methodology,” said Ran Canetti(opens a new tab) of Boston University.
Now, a new paper (opens a new tab) has shaken that bedrock assumption.
More here.
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