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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:19 ADT
Bill Stewart (bill.stewart@pobox.com)
Thu, 26 Mar 1998 09:18:49 -0800
At 01:03 PM 3/25/98 -0500, Mordechai Ovits wrote:
>Why not just use plain old sequence numbers, and discard those with bad
>MACs? The advantage of doing it this way is that you can alter the
>ratio of chaff to wheat below 1:1. This could help alleviate the size
>issue. It would look like this -
>(1,0,335683) // good bit
>(2,1,484653) // bad mac, discard
>(3,1,373636) // good bit
>(4,0,345732) // good bit
>(5,0,237345) // bad mac discard
You could do that, but then the sequence numbers no longer tell you
if you've gotten all the bits, missed some, or gotten extras,
which is the point of having sequence numbers at all.
Also, some of the real security of Rivest's method is that
for each message bit, you have both a 0 and a 1 as possibilities,
and there's no way to tell which is real.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:19 ADT