Cybersecurity can be tightened by generating true random numbers, a new study has shown.

In a recent survey conducted by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the majority of U.S. households are still concerned about their online security. Online presence is voluntarily reduced because of fear that their sensitive personal information may be leaked.

Symantec has said that cybersecurity attacks will become even worse until a solution arises.

It seems that Symantec's concern has been heard. Computer scientists from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin were able to develop a new method that would produce truly random numbers, which can efficiently code data and enhance online security.

True Random Numbers And Cybersecurity

UT computer science Professor David Zuckerman and graduate student Eshan Chattopadhyay were able to devise a method that allows the generation of true random numbers without the intricate computational efforts of previous methods.

Zuckerman said that early methods used to generate random numbers are not practical as they require that one or two source sequences must be truly random, which presents the potential problem as to which of them must be used first.

Their method ignores those restrictions and permits the use of two weak random sequences to generate one sequence of truly random numbers.

They believe that the method would pave the way for a tightened security for several activities, such as credit card purchases, electronic poll voting and army communications. The scientists even said the technology can simulate the Earth's climate accurately.

"One common way that encryption is misused is by not using high-quality randomness," said Zuckerman. "So in that sense, by making it easier to get high-quality randomness, our methods could improve security."

The random number extractor developed by Zuckerman and Chattopadhyay would indeed have numerous important applications, particularly in data encryption, said Yael Kalai, who works in cryptography and a senior researcher at Microsoft Research New England.

The method will be presented at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in Massachusetts this June.

A draft report of their new method is published in Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity.