How to Win at Roulette Explains Randomness Problems for Security

[00:01] Safe Source, and we're going to talk about the problem of the difficulty in about the problem of the difficulty in generating random numbers. Look at this case that just came out in Blumberg, a study of a group that was making money playing roulette. They were

[00:16] betting on roulette wheels in casinos and winning money. How can you sense, it's not a random game in theory, right? So let's understand how they did it and what this has to do with software and

[00:30] information security. This article was suggested by Gordão Ucrânia and several other people. Thank you to the people who suggested the news, thank you to you who are our content, please leave your like and subscribe to the channel. Well,

[00:45] like and subscribe to the channel. Well, a rather curious case, right? The game works. Here in Brazil, we don't have casinos, but if you've been to a casino in another country, or seen movies about it, you should know how it works. You have

[00:58] a series of options you can choose from: you can bet on a number, you can bet on a line, you can bet on a color, red, black—there are a series of bets you can make. You can bet that at a certain point the roulette operator

[01:13] releases the ball, and it will spin around, right? The roulette wheel is spinning, and it will randomly land on a number. If you guess the number, the color, the column, or four numbers correctly—there are many

[01:28] ways to bet—you win. But the interesting thing about roulette is that it's a very fair game. For example, if you bet on red and black, which are two colors, you have a 50% chance of winning. If you win, you win

[01:42] double. So, it's much more balanced than, for example, the Mega-Sena lottery. If you win, you win 30% of the total bet, which means you're statistically losing money. You're always losing

[01:57] money in the Mega-Sena, right? In roulette, it 's unfair. If you bet on red and black, you have a 50% chance of winning. If you win, you win double. If you bet on a number—since there are 35 numbers— you win 35 times the amount you

[02:11] bet. So, in the end, it balances your chance of winning. it balances your chance of winning. It's proportional to how much you win if you get that bet right; it's a fairer type of bet in the end, right?

[02:24] Similarly, bets on four-number combinations and columns are all proportional, so the chance of winning is proportional to how much you win if you win in the end, right? So it seems like roulette, a perfect game

[02:40] balanced, right? But there's a detail: did you notice that there's a little green number like this? Look, it's the number zero. That's where the house wins money in roulette because you can't bet on the number zero;

[02:55] you don't win anything. It's not black or red. So it's only in that chance that the house wins when the ball lands on the number zero on the roulette wheel, and that's

[03:07] enough for casinos to make a fortune with the game, while everyone else plays in a balanced way, right? You have a balance in the game; if you bet on green, if it lands on green, the house wins, and that's how they

[03:22] become millionaires in roulette, right? Notice it's just one little number that gives the house an advantage over the players. And what did people notice? This article here is

[03:34] very detailed; it explains... He recounts a case that happened 20 years ago. So, this type of scam, if you try it now, doesn't work anymore. But what 's the idea that people realized, right? What these scholars realized about roulette?

[03:48] Roulette was designed to be perfectly random; you throw something there, it's rolling to the other, the ball is perfectly weighted, everything there has very strong patterns, right? But the fact they realized is that

[04:03] inevitably, as the roulette wheel gets older, it starts to acquire biases; it starts to land more on certain numbers than others. So all you need to do is observe the roulette wheel very closely for a long

[04:18] time and discard the two least drawn numbers on that wheel. Notice the house's advantage over the player is just the number zero. If you discard two

[04:31] numbers that never come up because that roulette wheel's bias leads to a non-uniform distribution, then you've already beaten the house. And if you beat the house, you win as much money as you want; you win more than the casino.

[04:45] Notice how it works, right? And these people actually did it; he won. He won over a million. Pounds in one night. They managed to pull off this kind of scam. It's logical, after a while you start doing this, Cassiano's people

[04:59] realize you're winning unfairly and quickly they ask you not to play anymore, right? And more than that, they made several changes to the roulette wheel. It seems that nowadays the little motor that spins the wheel—because you

[05:13] motor that spins the wheel—because you have the manual spin of the wheel—but that was abandoned a long time ago, even for fear that the person spinning the wheel might be cheating. So you have a roulette motor in the more modern roulette wheels, and this

[05:25] roulette motor in the more modern roulette wheels, and this rotor is now electronically configured to have an acceleration or deceleration in a way that makes it deceleration in a way that makes it impossible to try to counterbalance the

[05:37] defects of the table, right? And what they say here is this: the game is supposedly completely random, but the wheel develops some flaws over time, right?

[05:49] Small scratches, small flaws there in the thing, this makes it a little more predictable. Notice what's happening here: people always considered these random mechanical systems to be

[06:05] better than random electronic systems, now they are using random electronics to solve the problem of... The random number problem of... The random number generator isn't that great, is it?

[06:17] He recounts several cases where they won over a million pounds in one night, and so on, and that in reality, to make money at roulette, all you have to do is discard two numbers. If you manage to discard two

[06:30] numbers, you've already turned the tables in your favor; you have a greater chance of you might have to play for a long time, it might take a long time to make money, but you will make money.

[06:45] Anyway, they talk about some solutions that casinos have created, and so on, that they tried to address this issue of the variable number generator in roulette,

[06:58] and so on. This is very interesting, but it highlights the point I always make: the issue of randomness is very sensitive in information security. randomness is when creating a password, when creating a

[07:13] private key, when performing any encryption operation. If an attacker manages to discover the random number you used in the vector and sees it in Triple 10 encryption, AES encryption, they can break your

[07:28] encryption. So, it's very important to have a good random number generator. Generating this in security functions, right? People don't give it that much importance, it's right? People don't give it that much importance, it's very funny, this case here. If you've made it this far

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