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
One could ask the same question about throwing a die. Given the laws of nature, would someone know the exact initial position, the direction of the throw, the force used, the air conditions, gravity and so on, how could it be random?
Well, for the purpose of us playing say backgammon, it’s random enough. Would you still use dice when playing with an very advanced civilization that could compute the outcome of the throw as described above? Probably not.
Random on computers is pretty much the same. We have simple random algorithms for when it doesn’t really matter much and we also have crypto-graphically more secure algorithms for when the result of the randomness is important to us. We wouldn’t want someone knowing on what kind of device and at what time roughly the password got generated, to be able to “randomly” generate it again.
However, for most purposes where one would generate a random password, like using a password manager to generate unique random passwords for your accounts, it isn’t such a big deal. What I mean by that is that if someone had enough access to your machine to figure out the inputs and factors that ended up with you getting that password generated in order to steal it by generating it again the same way, well, they might’ve just stolen your password directly if they had such access which would render HOW it was generated quite irrelevant.
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