RANDOM

> Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this? In BASIC, the word "RANDOMIZE" sets the seed for the RND function, and you'll find it's initially dependant on time (including the typing speed of the user): https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L295 It then is reinitialised periodically by mixing in run time (which is highly variable due to microprocessor limitations) and checksums of previous parts of the stream: https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L319 The RAND[123] appears to be Bennett Fox's Algorithm 647, which was designed for simulation purposes (statistical randomness), and is based on Lewis-Goodman-Miller's construction from 1969, so it had a great deal of scrutiny. I think this would have been state of the art in the late 1980s.

> that your pad generation is actually random The one thing that stood out to me with the original blog post and a quick glance at the code was that it appeared as if the pad was certainly not actually random. Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this? Edit: It seems that the random generation can be found starting here https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b... With three methods, one (RAND2) seems to use the basic interpreter rng more or less directly and the other two seem to be fairly simple prngs seeded from the basic interpreter's rng. I don't actually know what the state of basic interpreter rngs was in the early '80s but I would be fairly surprised if they're anything that is secure.

I've got a look at his number generator for the secure one-time pad, and Melissa O'Neil would be proud. Almost pcg. It uses the powerbasic system Rand LCG to switch between 3 new rand1-3 functions, two of them with different LCG's. https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b...