[7281] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: random seed generation without user interaction?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Kelsey)
Wed Jun 7 19:12:11 2000
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Message-Id: <4.1.20000607054551.00952f00@email.plnet.net>
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 05:47:28 -0500
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: John Kelsey <kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com>
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At 10:33 PM 6/6/00 -0400, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
...
>The patent appears much broader than just focusing a camera on a Lava
>lamp. They claim digitizing the state of any chaotic system and then
>hashing it to seed a PRNG. The Lava lamp is given as a specific
>example (claim 3).
Wouldn't Don Davis' work on hard drive timings, in which he specifically
claimed that the system was chaotic, qualify as prior art for this?
[Wouldn't all the work done on things like hashing inputs in general
to distil entropy, which was around for years before this patent,
count? --Perry]
>Arnold Reinhold
--John Kelsey, kelsey@counterpane.com
