[42087] in Cypherpunks
Re: Reducing the Flames, Attacks, and Nit-Pickings
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Brickner)
Mon Oct 23 22:22:04 1995
To: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: (Your message of Sun, 22 Oct 1995 22:01:07 PDT.)
<acb06aea5b021004cdd9@[205.199.118.202]>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 20:33:35 -0500
From: Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>
Timothy C. May writes:
>Worse, idle speculation about possible security flaws seems wasteful.
Not always. A couple of months ago someone was asking what the fuss
was about in making sure random number generators were secure. In
describing potential problems with poor RNG seeds I "idly" speculated
that if Netscape has a lousy RNG that it might be *lots* easier to
attack that than the (then current) brute force attack was.
A week or to later, Ian posted a reverse engineered copy of the
Netscape RNG stuff, and a week or so after that announced his big
hole.
Occasionally, idle speculation sparks good ideas.
