New method to boost cybersecurity evolved

Computer scientists at the University of Texas at Austin developed the method that can be used to make electronic voting more secure, conduct statistically significant polls and more accurately simulate complex systems such as Earth’s climate.

The method creates truly random numbers with less computational effort than other methods, which could facilitate significantly higher levels of security for everything from consumer credit card transactions to military communications.

The new method developed by Professor David Zuckerman and graduate student Eshan Chattopadhyay takes two weakly random sequences of numbers and turns them into one sequence of truly random numbers. Weakly random sequences, such as air temperatures and stock market prices sampled over time, harbour predictable patterns. Truly random sequences have nothing predictable about them, like a coin toss.

Previous versions of randomness extractors were less practical because they either required that one of the two source sequences be truly random (which presents a chicken or the egg problem) or that both source sequences be close to truly random, researchers said.