alt Hacker NewsSure, but you’re pressing on the truth that a small modification taken to an extreme is a large modification.
When the original point was that a tiny fractional loss in an RNG is not going to make a practical difference. Which I believe is also true. And it is also true that a large loss in an RNG is catastrophic.
They can both be true.
And roulette is 2 out of 38, 5.2%. That’s 17 times more than the 1/256 here, which was already a simplification of the (I think) 1/65536 in question.
With respect, I think you're still missing my point, which is simply that bias introduces vulnerability. Without a real scenario to analyze, the scale doesn't really factor into the argument. A vulnerability is a vulnerability until proven mitigated.
> a tiny fractional loss in an RNG is not going to make a practical difference
I'm not so sure this is true. I don't think either of us is in a place to say whether this vulnerability has practical applications or not. A 1/65536 bias might seem like nothing important to you. It seems like potentially something to me, in a world where the attacker might control the volume of data generated.