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."