Why are countries creating public random number generators?

By Sophia ChenJun. 28, 2018 , 12:00 PM

In Chile, politicians resent the Comptroller General, which audits government officials to prevent corruption. The audits are supposed to be random—but scrutinized officials sometimes complain about unfair targeting. "The auditors have to convince the public they're doing their work honestly," says Alejandro Hevia, a computer scientist at the University of Chile in Santiago. Along with researchers around the world, he is developing technology that could persuade critics that audits are truly random: public random number generators.

On 10 July, Hevia's team will unveil an online random number service. Later in July, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will launch its Randomness Beacon as a permanent service, upgrading a pilot program that began in 2013. Brazil, too, is planning a beacon, by the end of 2019. All aim to improve on commercial random number generators, not only by being free, but by generating the random numbers through transparent protocols and permanently archiving them. The services could benefit everyday applications such as cryptography and lotteries—and also research. Some scientific simulation methods rely on random numbers, and clinicians could use them in drug trials to fairly assign who gets a treatment or placebo.

"We want to put randomness on the internet for people to use in whatever way they can find," says Rene Peralta, a computer scientist at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, who leads the U.S. effort. "I think of it as digital infrastructure."