Re: Fortuna

Matt Mackall
2005-04-18T19:13:23Z

[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.