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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:11 ADT
Cicero (cicero@redneck.efga.org)
7 Jul 1998 17:55:14 -0000
Marcus Watts wrote:
>What looks random on the scope isn't necessarily truely random.
>You want to get together with a good mathematician and a good
>electrical engineer and apply all sorts of statistical tests to
>it before you can be reasonably sure it's "true random" noise. Also,
Statistical tests will not suffice to make "reasonably sure" that is
is OK, they only suffice to make positively sure it is not OK.
Certainly a good exercise, though, for that reason.
<snip>
>noise from the air - and you can hear a louder form of it in a
>seashell.
I'll have to ask Mr. Science, but I believe that the rushing blood in
your ear is the source here (but I am straying from crypto-relevance).
<snip>
>Whatever your source, if your "random" data doesn't pass a good statistics
>test, it may still be useful as a source of "true random" data.
Yes.
>You'll
>just have to do more post processing on it, to reduce the data rate and
>throw out the non-randomness.
Careful there, how are you "throwing out"? What might be referred to
as entropy distillation has many pitfalls. It sounds like you are
going to throw out the bad bits and keep the good ones. That won't
work. Hashing techniques may be OK, but I believe we are short on
proofs.
Cicero
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:11 ADT