Comment by CSMastermind
10 hours ago
It's not that 4 isn't a valid seed (though insanely unlikely) it's that once I know your values weren't picked randomly because I guessed one of them I can easily figure out the others.
In this case one cert gets defeated and you go the odds of that number being that low are 2^-384. Essentially impossible if it were randomly selected. It's much more likely you didn't choose that at random so I start guessing a bunch of other low numbers for your other certificates and find them quickly.
> It's not that 4 isn't a valid seed (though insanely unlikely)
I have an insanely unlikely unique car licence plate number to sell you.
> Essentially impossible if it were randomly selected.
You would say the same of any seed I gave you. You've just artificially assigned this number with some sort of emotional importance.
There are several very practical reasons (and not emotional) reasons to expect that "4" is the result of bad implementation.
I can think any number of programming mistakes that will result in a supposed (pseudo-)random number generator to be be biased to very small numbers. I have made such mistakes myself.
By any reasonable estimate, the probability of randomly picking a number below 256 is MUCH smaller than the probability of someone having made a mistake.
So you say that programming mistakes make small numbers more likely to be picked, and therefore seeing a small number is less likely than seeing a bigger number?
That doesn't make sense, does it?
If you cherry-pick that statement in isolation you're technically correct. But in practice the whole comment you're replying to is actually correct, in this case if you saw the number four, one would be correct in concluding that's unlikely and searching other low digit numbers, the proof of that is that it happened here.
I think they are right and you are wrong. If I understand properly you say:
"Playing roulette, in isolation after RED - RED - RED - RED - RED, there is not a higher chance of getting BLACK than RED in the next run. But in practice, one would be correct in concluding that it will probably be BLACK. The proof is that in our test, the next run gave BLACK".
Said differently, it was not particularly unlikely that the number would be 4. But maybe it got the attention of the person who decided to try assuming that it was a mistake, and they were indeed lucky.
They had multiple keys and 7 of the keys were numbers less than 256.
Yes, and that is what's statistically impossible. They said one cert.
> In this case one cert gets defeated and you go the odds of that number being that low are 2^-384.
I don't see why you would get downvoted for that. You're right.
It just happened that that particular number got the attention of a human, which was luck. But in terms of statistics, this number was not less likely than another one.