[66719] in Cypherpunks
Re: Mousepad RNG's?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy C. May)
Sat Sep 28 13:41:35 1996
In-Reply-To: <199609281551.IAA03203@dns2.noc.best.net>
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996 10:37:23 -0800
To: Cypherpunks@toad.com
From: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>
At 8:13 PM -0700 9/27/96, James A. Donald wrote:
>Some time ago, at a cypherpunks conference, people were making
>all sorts of ridiculous proposals for being really, really,
>really, sure that you had real entropy, and a prominent
>cypherpunk, possibly Tim May, said, "This is ridiculous:
>Nobody ever broke good crypto through weakness in the
>source of truly random numbers". Sometime after that
>Netscape was broken through weakness in the source of
>truly random numbers.
This somewhat misrepresents what I said, back at that Cypherpunks meeting
in 1993-4.
The Netscape "random number generator" that was the basis of the Goldberg
and Wagner attack was not even remotely a _physical_ random number
generator, as it relied on various Unix clock readings and not on any
physical sources of entropy (such as mouse tracks, Johnson noise,
radioactivity, etc.). It was a classic case of living in a state of sin.
--Tim May
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
