The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, has developed and deployed the Colorado University Randomness Beacon (CURBy), the first random number generator to use quantum entanglement as a certifiable source of randomness. The system is publicly accessible and operates under a protocol that allows any user to verify its outputs, addressing a long-standing challenge in cryptographic and public randomness services.
CURBy is based on a NIST-run Bell test that produces raw randomness from entangled photon pairs. This type of quantum nonlocality ensures the outcomes are fundamentally unpredictable and cannot be pre-determined or manipulated, distinguishing it from classical or pseudo-random generators. The system refines this entropy into binary outputs via a processing stack that includes the Twine protocol, a novel blockchain-inspired framework that ensures traceability and transparency of the full randomness generation pipeline.
Over its first 40 days of operation, CURBy successfully produced verifiable randomness in 99.7% of attempts, generating 512-bit outputs from over 250,000 entanglement trials per second. Users can independently audit and validate the randomness through the open-source data logs and Twine’s hash-based certification framework, which allows future interoperability with other beacons and supports robust, decentralized security models.
The initiative represents the first publicly available quantum randomness beacon backed by provable quantum advantage. Potential applications include secure lotteries, cryptographic key generation, resource allocations, and any domain requiring a tamper-resistant, public source of entropy. This effort builds on NIST’s prior foundational experiments on Bell inequality violations and positions CURBy as a pioneering infrastructure service for quantum-secure public systems.
Read the full announcement from NIST here and the peer-reviewed study in Nature here.
June 11, 2025
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