I did an easier version of this in my college intro class. There was a class competition that involved rock paper scissors as a subcomponent, and ties were broken with randomness. You could rig Java’s prng so you would win all ties.
The prng was seeded with usec time at first call. I called the rng a bunch of times to harvest entropy, and scanned the plausible usec times to find the seed. Then I primed the prng so I would win ties.
Frankly, I assume I implemented this wrong, but the theory was there lol.
I am failing to find the article, but some early online poker systems used the server time as the seed coupled with a weak PRNG. With the information of the hole cards + community cards, after a few hands, could quickly determine exactly what seed was being used and perfectly predict everyone's cards.
I don't think this was the original source, but this paper matches your (& my) recollection: <a href="https://gwern.net/doc/cs/cryptography/2006-arkin.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/doc/cs/cryptography/2006-arkin.pdf
google surfaces a couple of HN posts, but the source (cigital.com) seems to be a dead domain at this point:
It's a bad shuffle implementation + using time of day as seed (reducing search space). Using the player's 2 cards and the 3 flop cards, it finds the RNG seed in real time, and then future hands (on the same server) are solved in "under one second!"
strstr · · focus · HN ↗
The prng was seeded with usec time at first call. I called the rng a bunch of times to harvest entropy, and scanned the plausible usec times to find the seed. Then I primed the prng so I would win ties.
Frankly, I assume I implemented this wrong, but the theory was there lol.
3eb7988a1663 · · focus · HN ↗
e28eta · · focus · HN ↗
google surfaces a couple of HN posts, but the source (cigital.com) seems to be a dead domain at this point:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288138">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288138
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914607">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914607
It's a bad shuffle implementation + using time of day as seed (reducing search space). Using the player's 2 cards and the 3 flop cards, it finds the RNG seed in real time, and then future hands (on the same server) are solved in "under one second!"
3eb7988a1663 · · focus · HN ↗