How are “random” passwords generated

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I mean if it’s generated by some piece of code that would imply it follows some methodology or algorithm to come up with something. How could that be random? Random is that which is unpredictable.

In: Mathematics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

If you have enough information about the starting conditions and the process involved, anything is predictable. A coin toss isn’t random if the person tossing the coin has practiced flipping it so it lands on one side or another. For practical purposes, randomness isn’t so much about an unpredictable outcome as it is about distributing information in such a way that no one has access to what would be needed to predict the outcome. To put it another way, it’s about distributing ignorance of the starting conditions and the process.

That’s why things like the tick count since boot are useful in pseudorandom generators: it’s not that the condition can’t be known, it’s that an adversary won’t have enough information to know it.

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