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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:09 ADT
Michael Paul Johnson (mpj@ebible.org)
Tue, 07 Jul 1998 07:54:13 -0600
At 11:23 AM 7/7/98 +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
>William H. Geiger III wrote:
>> - From the little research I have done so far there seem to be no way of
>> influencing the time between hits in any predictable manner.
>
>I'm not convinced this is true: I can't influence the way a sample
>decays, but surely I can inject my own alpha/beta/gamma particles into
>the system at predictable moments? I'm not saying this is cheap or easy,
>but surely possible.
This would be essentially impossible to do without being detected, because
the equipment needed to do so would have to be both large and near the
detector. Not only that, but it would be essentially impossible to
eliminate natural background radiation and/or radiation from the natural
source(s) set up by your victim. It would be much easier to replace the
software on his computer to simulate doing what he thought he was really
doing. Another alternative would be to doctor the detector such that fake
pulses from a PRNG came out instead of measured pulses. Of course, you
could add radiation intensity to the signal I measure, but it will most
likely be just as random unless you use a particle accelerator cannon with
very tight timings and very good aim. I've never heard of such a thing
being constructed, in such a way as to be portable, but I suppose someone
with a billion dollars could do so. It would only take me less than a
hundred dollars to construct a very effective countermeasure, though. I
consider that good enough...
If I carefully construct a radiation detector random number generator in a
physically secure environment, however, and don't mess up on either
hardware, software, or algorithms, then I have truly random numbers that
you can't predict or affect in any meaningful manner.
_______
Michael Paul Johnson
mpj@ebible.org http://ebible.org http://cryptography.org
PO BOX 1151, Longmont CO 80502-1151, USA Jesus Christ is Lord!
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:09 ADT