[41650] in Cypherpunks
Re: Using deterministic programs to select private RSA keys.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Norman Hardy)
Tue Oct 17 20:31:57 1995
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 16:53:21 -0800
To: "Martin Diehl" <mdiehl@dttus.com>, cypherpunks@toad.com
From: norm@netcom.com (Norman Hardy)
At 10:38 AM 10/17/95, Martin Diehl wrote:
....
> I suggest that if you capture the time in microseconds between
> keystrokes and insert the least significant 8 bits between the
> corresponding characters (i. e. <letter1> <time2 - time1> <letter2>
> <time3 - time2> <letter3> ... <letter nnn> <time until double CR -
> time nnn>) and MD5 the set of values, the resulting "random" value
> will be different for both people who type different input texts as
> well as those people who type the same input text.
....
Indeed, but the point of the proposal is a determinate and reproducible
program behavior so as to gain confidence that the output is correct by
comparing output of several programs.
....
> As regards the observation that MD5 produces only a 128 bit result,
> you could call MD5 after each nn values (at least 16) have been
> entered. In that way a few lines of input and associated timing
> values could easily generate a value of the same order of magnitude as
> the number of 1K primes.
....
Sounds good.
