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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:38 ADT
David Honig (honig@m7.sprynet.com)
Sun, 19 Jul 1998 14:27:37 -0700
At 10:07 AM 7/16/98 -0000, Cicero wrote:
>"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@invweb.net> wrote:
>>I think that the whole point of going with a RNG is due to the
>>inadequacies of software based systems.
>
>The reason that I advocate going with a PRNG is due to inadequacies in
>RNGs.
>
>A certain amount of "keying material", such as session keys, nonces,
>... are required for crypto applications. Most platforms currently
>do not have RNG chips. So I gather data which contains some entropy,
>hash it, and seed a PRNG. A smart card might either not have room for
>a RNG, or might not be able to afford its expense. The small device
>would have its entropy seed loaded, and run off it until a reloading.
>
>Even if I had a RNG whose manufacturer I trusted, how would I know it
>was not defective, or that the maker, though honest, had not erred
>either in design or in manufacture, or had degraded since manufacture?
>
>I can read the source for my software PRNG.
Um, various entities can recover the structure of any chip, including
mixed-signal true-RNGs. This is routinely done in the digital world.
Ross Anderson & Markus Kuhn have some excellent open papers about this.
Crystals whose physical properties change in an electric field are your
friends. Electron microscopes aren't just for bacteria anymore, bud.
Mykotronix (now part of Rainbow) is full of shit, but that's moot now.
Computers that play dice are not computers.
This is your computer. This is your computer with an oracle. Any questions?
honig@alum.mit.edu
Speech is not protected simply because we write it in a language
Federal Judge Gwin on the Bernstein case
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:38 ADT