Also, as a game design note, a 1% chance of a big win would be far higher (and likely result in far lower play) than any game we implemented; I don’t recall any of our competitors using anything close to a 1% chance of a high win, either. Russian hacker who reverse-engineered an RNG, One of the main photos of the year: Messi and Ronaldo met again (finally!) In other words, it was the game design, not the PRNG that determined how swingy the wins were (barring code defects). He is currently living in Russia, afraid to leave the country’s borders instead of risk arrest. August 7, 2017 6:35 AM. Never store your password on a public machine, and never cache it either. This leads to an interesting question. August 12, 2017 4:28 PM. But whatever the number is, we can agree that a 32-bit RNG seed is too small. They couldn’t build a reputation if there were a lot of vulnerabilities in their products that can be easily exploited IMO. “Equipped with Alex’s information and software, both obtained online for free, anyone with a smartphone will be able to turn a vulnerable slot machine into a gaudily decorated ATM” – this is silly. A PRNG starts from an arbitrary starting state using a seed state.Many numbers are generated in a short time and can also be reproduced later, if the … We were trying for both. I think that goes further, making it actual bad public policy. Allocate slot of 100 rolls, place in 30 small wins and 10 medium and one big. To test these flaws and indeed reverse-engineer a random number generator producing deviates on [0, 1], one can proceed as follows. However on the assumption people will gamble irrespective of the harm it does to them or their loved ones there is then the question of harm to the rest of society. Players can check if a platform has an SSL certificate, signifying that all transferred data gets ciphered by looking at the platform’s URL. So far I’ve heard about machines being hacked by modyfiing the single chip computer in order to decrease the win rate, so that the owner can pocket the difference and pay no taxes from it. Apparently many developers did not care much about security of their PRNGs. This is to sidestep anti gambling laws. Tags: gambling, hacking, random numbers, reverse engineering, Posted on August 7, 2017 at 6:00 AM • Interesting story:. And THAT is how the advantage of the house is created. I don’t understand why all slot machines do not use cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators. Even when the casino/lottery doesn’t know why, they’ll shut it down within a few days or less just because the payouts seem unusually high. I think it was less than enough for a full deck to be correctly randomized). It’s a bit like knowing which scratch card to buy. Yes, the vast majority of the players know that odds are against them and that over time they’ll lose money. Thus, creating a new number. Use your google-fu on “intermittent reinforcement”. What a poor implementation means (and only if an exploit of it gets publicly know) is that the players will consider it “unfair”. Anyway, I find it incredible that today there are still people playing slot machines. If it keeps doing so, or no good explanation comes up, they’ll shut that game down. The venture is built on Alex’s talent for reverse engineering the algorithms — known as pseudorandom number generators, or PRNGs — that govern how slot machine games behave. August 7, 2017 10:34 AM. Should the casinos actually care that their slots are being gamed? November 10, 2018 12:16 PM, Really quick which i hope this doesnt come back to haunt me…, all casinos use a backend program called slotmaster to tighten the machine on the fly while a player is playing, .. i had it done to me where it simply wouldn’t pay out despite having inside info on the total needed to cause it too as determined by the tech who serviced it and had the reports. These are phony sites or email addresses that mimic real ones and try to get you to provide information or click on a link that will install malware. However, that’s not necessary, as 128-bit encryption is virtually uncrackable. I am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people. You can use this tool to draw winning numbers for your raffle. . The potential downside is it generates a long sequence of out of range numbers thus it takes an uncertain length of time to output an inrange number. Clive Robinson • (as long as they are not fixed themselves). Subsequently we have had “The War on drugs” which has caused as least as much if not more damage to society not just of the US but many other countries. If the PRNG is weak, like that of the older Aristocrat machines, is it reasonable to assume that the casino’s supervisory control system (supposedly isolated from the slot’s PRNG) knows the PRNG sequence, knows exactly when the PRNG was initialized (to the microsecond) and knows exactly when the PRNG is supposed to spit out that winning random number? I worked for about 5 years in the gambling industry writing code for slot-type machines for state entities. In the old days you would have had even more good sources: timing the coin drop in the slot, weight distribution in the coin holder, velocity profile of the machine arm. Well, yes – from the casino’s perspective, they’re getting x% of every dollar on average, which (with enough plays) tends to come out nearly exactly. August 7, 2017 10:12 AM. It turned out to be the latter, as they had fallen prey to a Russian mathematician and programmer called Alex. After being employed by an unscrupulous casino to tweak Novomatic slots to pay out lower than usual, Alex learned how to reverse-engineer the company’s random number generators. If people are going to stupidly throw money away, even though I wish they would not. Final tips include immediately verifying your account after registration, only withdrawing funds using established payment methods, and maintaining low withdrawal limits at the start of your gaming adventure. Having a failure of a PRNG in a one armed bandit allows for even better money laundering, this could be where some of the 100 dollar bills come from that feed the commonwealth banks smart ATMs, that then send the money overseas without any audit. This will guarantee that win ratio will be fixed on next 100 rolls to come. August 7, 2017 6:45 AM. Decades ago I lived in Blue Diamond, a township outside of North Las Vegas, and all of the locals laughed at the tourists who think they’re gambling when in reality all they’re doing is handing over a percentage of their money to organized crime. Kai • Dmitry • It is a computer program that seemingly at random spits out spin results. Even if the PRNG is total disaster, the win ratio won’t change. Even though you don’t need forward secrecy for a gaming machine, it doesn’t hurt, and the algorithm is a simple design, and more than sufficient for random numbers in gambling. Remaining numbers will have the required frequency distribution. @Bear, I’m a tad curious as to the envelope you used, I’m seeing about 225.6 bits of information in a shuffled deck of cards, not about 240 and yes, a lot of PRNG implementations are absolutely terrible with entirely too little state being retained. Lagos • The Austrian company is a massive gaming brand, pulling in annual revenues of over €5 billion. I suspect he may run out of easy targets soon, so he is looking for some “consulting fees” now. You can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation and discover that there are 240 bits of information in a shuffled deck of cards. .. — …. That said, back when I worked on slot machines, we had a test bed of 32 slot machines, which we had set up to automatically hit the correct buttons. Clive Robinson • August 23, 2017 7:55 AM. The only thing you should be able to predict is that the house eventually comes out ahead. Remaining 59 rolls will lose. That said, other than in a dispute situation, the casino/lottery doesn’t care about the individual pays – they care about he collective ones, over a day, a week, a month, or even a year. Sadly, it’s an expense attached to an addictive behavior – compulsion, poor judgment, innumeracy, improper dopamine response, whatever combination of the above. If it has an 's' at the end of HTTP(S), it uses data security. The idea is to pay out just enough, and just often enough, to keep the player at the machine – the longer the better for casino profits. Not quite, the primary requirment at any point in time with gambling machines is that they “are and remain ahead” not that they will be ahead at some future point in time. If you know this state, you can predict all future outcomes of the random number generators. August 8, 2017 2:15 AM. Pseudo-random numbers. They then send timing data to a custom app on an agent’s phone; this data causes the phones to vibrate a split second before the agent should press the “Spin” button. Rather more so than other countries where drugs have not been used for a faux moral crusade. Eider • The sad part is that the slot-machine vulnerability is so easy to fix. They rely on unpredictable processes like thermal or atmospheric noise rather than human-defined patterns. If a rube gives up on the machine when there are – say – 20 pulls left in the block of 100 and the big win hasn’t come up, take over and play until it does. bickerdyke • I don’t know whether the issue is a smaller, more specialized market where the same level of expense to justify some effort has a smaller number of victims to get spread over, or a failure of expertise to cross over from other venues, or simply a cultural question of how security is valued. They fix the outcome. 1) java.util.Random. If you do everything mentioned above, security should not be an issue. Watch out for cookies and read up on password managers and how they can improve security. August 10, 2017 11:55 AM. its not the putz patrons who are fooled by the machines, but rather the career con men and techniques which these snake oil salesmen silver-tongued bastards have a lifetime to perfect and if that doesn’t get you then the back end changes in slot behavior which everyone says is not possible.. will.. while i was taken advantage of and targeted during a time of loss as i had a family member pass away and wanted to just disconnect for a weekend, (never been to a casino before) there should of been a duty of care enacted which enough of the staff were pissed at the management to where they have given statements to the effect of the illicit dishonest objectives done to fleece me…. But when it’s a major source of funding for a state or nation it has the effect of a regressive tax. For example, squaring the number "1111" yields "1234321", which can be written as "01234321", an 8-digit number being the square of a 4-digit number. In today’s age, you are more likely to become a victim due to your carelessness than that of someone else. Frank Wilhoit • .. . I know that a player doesn’t have the information, but a casino’s supervisory control system could easily add an analog voltage to gate the slot’s push button start (not necessarily isolated from supervisory control system), to match or avoid the exact time corresponding to a winning random number. For most casinos, that would just mean more play on other machines (ones that aren’t broken). The payouts are deliberately non-random in order to milk the gambling herd. When signing up, create a complex password and change it regularly. I have personally seen such an implementation. I can tell you from the data I had that there were weeks where some of our most popular games lost money (due to large progressive payouts occurring on those weeks). Random Number Generator (RNG) A random number generator is a system used to generate a set of numbers that cannot be reasonably predicted better than by random chance. I know of at least 1 case/country where (at least officially) the reason is to make sure that the customers have a fair chance to win. Otherwise, everyone would take advantage of it. What’s more likely is an ex-employee who deliberately introduced a subtle weakness, and made some extra money on the side. Since the user has to physically interact with a slot machine you have a pretty good source of random number generation. Rick • A public lottery only cares if the results are truly random because the lottery can never pay out more than what was put in. Multiple the deviates by N , testing all N 's between 1 and 1,000,000,000, to see if some N always result in an integer. Some even go the extra step and provide 256-bit encryption. Maybe worth mentioning: It’s not just for the evil casinos that the machines are badly tainted. I'm a fellow and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School, a board member of EFF, and the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc. We also had slot games with similar odds for the top prize. I reverse engineered their Android OTP code generator and ported it to an Arduino-compatible microcontroller. But there’s that “chance” that they’ll win and that’s why they’re playing. While I can’t comment on if Alex reverse engineered the PRNG, I’ll note that when I was working for a slot machine company, that was one of our biggest fears. As to Alex, it seems to me his only talent is to identify slot machines that use with a weak PRNG (most likely by reverse-engineering software of those machines). randrange(): The randrange() function, as mentioned earlier, allows the user to generate values by … The main company we dealt with (GLI – link above) used a variety of statistical tests and would look for known defects in PRNGs. Daniel answered your second question. I have no reason to think that most or all of our competitors didn’t have this in mind. The current algorithms are designed so that the casinos always end up earning profit (in long term). 43 Comments, Kai • That said, the most common way people try to turn the tables on these platforms is through bonus abuse, which involves cheating the system so that players walk away with more free-playing funds than what’s fair. Check by the authorities 2000 implementation of CryptGenRandom ( assuming the attacker has … pseudo-random.... 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