[4947] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Bridge
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Wed Jun 23 17:35:55 1999
To: cryptography@c2.net
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 12:47:02 -0400
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
With all due respect, I think many posters are missing the point. From
a cryptographic perspective, the problem is *easy*. The hard part is
the verifiable procedures, hardware, and software. That's why gross
physical randomness is so attractive to lotteries -- anyone can see (to
a first approximation, at least) that the mechanism is fair. But even
that isn't foolproof; a number of years ago, an insider at one state
lottery weighted some of the balls, to shift the odds in his favor.
Now -- how would you prevent that sort of thing in a bridge tournament?
Do you *really* know what code is running on your machine today?
