Re: Fortuna

[Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>]

[please reply to all when posting to lkml]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 01:08:47AM +0000, David Wagner wrote:
> >First, a reminder that the design goal of /dev/random proper is
> >information-theoretic security.  That is, it should be secure against
> >an attacker with infinite computational power.
> 
> I am skeptical.
> I have never seen any convincing evidence for this claim,
> and I suspect that there are cases in which /dev/random fails
> to achieve this standard.
> 
> And it seems I am not the only one.  See, e.g., Section 5.3 of:
> http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/029

Unfortunately, this paper's analysis of /dev/random is so shallow that
they don't even know what hash it's using. Almost all of section 5.3
is wrong (and was when I read it initially).

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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