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7e06/16/20251 replyview on HN

With a PRNG the seed must be kept secret and non-reverse-engineerable. Isn't that a real disadvantage compared with a TRNG?


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jasperry06/16/2025

Once a seed is fed to a PRNG, it can be deleted. But you still have a point, because the state of an OS PRNG can be saved and restored, for example when the machine sleeps, and a hacker could potentially access this to reproduce generated bits. But whenever the entropy pool is seeded with new entropy, any previous state values become useless.

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