Michael S Hines wrote:
| Speaking of esoteric seeds.....
|
| According to Wired 5.06 (June 97, pp 43) the scientists (Noll, Mende,
| and Sisodiya) at SGI, Inc are employing liquid filled lamps (aka Lava
| Lamps) to help generate random numbers for crypto.
|
| A digital camera snaps a photo of six Lava Lites. A crypto hash
| formula is then used to reduce the photo data into a seed number.
| The seed is plugged into a "Blum Blum Shub" pseudorandom algorithm
| to produce a cryptographically strong number. SGI has applied for a
| patent.
If you're going to use a bbs, you might as well roll dice to
start it off. the BBS generator has the nice property that even if
you know its entire output stream to date, predicting the next bit is
equal to factoring the product of primes.
(Thats analogous to the strength of the RSA cryptosystem.)
Its not fast, but it does offer a very strong source of
reasonably random numbers. You've probably moved your point of attack
to the compression of those numbers into memorable phonomes, or in
the passwords being written down.
Adam
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume
References:
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