concept Pseudo - Random Number Generator in category cryptography

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Real-World Cryptography MEAP V09. Login to get full access to this book.

Figure 8.3. A Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) generates a sequence of random numbers based on a seed. Using the same seed makes the PRNG produce the same sequence of random numbers. It should be impossible to recover the state using knowledge of the random outputs. It follows that it should be impossible, from observing the produced random numbers alone, to predict future random numbers or to recover previously generated random numbers.