Randomness might not seem like the hottest topic in cybersecurity — but without it, none of our encryption, privacy protections, or even fair systems like lotteries would actually work. And right now, JPMorgan Chase and its research partners are showing us a way to rethink how randomness is generated and trusted.

In their latest project, JPMorgan Chase’s Global Technology Applied Research team, working with Quantinuum, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and The University of Texas at Austin, demonstrated a breakthrough: Certified Randomness generated by a quantum computer.

Today, we mostly trust hardware or quirky physical sources (mouse movements, cosmic radiation, lava lamps) to generate randomness. But that trust is blind — and it doesn’t scale well or provide strong guarantees.

Certified Randomness changes that by offering:

• Verifiable guarantees that randomness truly comes from an unpredictable source.
• Mathematical proofs that it hasn’t been manipulated.
• No need to trust external providers — the randomness can be independently verified.

For cybersecurity teams, this could dramatically strengthen encryption, secure communications, and privacy protections without relying on assumptions about hardware or third-party systems.

Classical computers can’t generate certified randomness — but quantum computers can. That’s because quantum processes, like measuring a qubit in superposition, are intrinsically random.

In the demonstration:

• The team used the Quantinuum System Model H2, a 56-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer.
• They sent challenge circuits to Quantinuum, each producing outputs that classical supercomputers can’t feasibly simulate in real time.
• They demanded results back in under 2.5 seconds, ensuring the responses couldn’t be faked using conventional computing power.
• Verification of the randomness involved four supercomputers, including Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer.

The result? They verified that at least 71,313 bits of randomness were genuinely random, even assuming an attacker four times more powerful than the largest supercomputer today.

This achievement offers a new path forward for building cryptographic systems and privacy protocols where:

• You don’t have to trust that your randomness provider isn’t compromised.
• Attackers can’t easily fake or predict the random values you use.
• Critical security processes (like generating private keys or securing machine learning models) gain stronger, provable foundations.

It’s also important because it shows that quantum computing isn’t just theoretical — it’s starting to deliver real-world cybersecurity benefits today.