How deeply does Real-World Cryptography cover randomness?

Explains unpredictability, uniform distributions, physical sources, PRNG failures, and conservative sourcing, without implementation-level generation details.

Randomness

As explained in Real-World Cryptography

Randomness is the property of outcomes or data being difficult to predict and lacking a discernible deterministic pattern.

A secret key, nonce, IV, challenge, or prime number is only as safe as the randomness used to create it. In cryptography, randomness means outcomes that are difficult to predict, not merely numbers that look varied or evenly distributed. section 8.0 section 8.1

Good cryptographic randomness has several practical requirements:

It must be unpredictable to an attacker; a uniform-looking sequence is not enough. section 8.1
It should come from operating-system randomness or a trusted standard or cryptography library when available. section 8.4
It must avoid predictable seeds, noncryptographic generators, and incorrectly used userland PRNGs. section 8.4

When randomness becomes a security failure

A calculator can simulate randomness by reading a stored list whose values have a good distribution. That is unsuitable for secrets because the sequence may be predictable. Similarly, a damaged OpenSSL PRNG used process IDs as seeds; on Linux, the limited process-ID range sharply reduced possible seeds and affected generated SSL and SSH keys. section 8.1 section 8.4

How Real-World Cryptography covers it

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Also explained in

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Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming, Second EditionRandomness is the property of an outcome or event being determined by chance rather than being fully predictable from the available information.
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Statistics Slam DunkRandomness is the absence of a deterministic pattern in the occurrence of outcomes, subject to probabilistic regularities.
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Hacking CryptographyRandomness is the absence of a predictable pattern in an outcome or sequence according to a specified model of probability.
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Causal AIRandomness is the absence of a deterministic specification of an outcome, represented in a model by stochastic variation or random variables.

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This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Real-World Cryptography. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.