-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hello stewarts@ix.netcom.com, cypherpunks@toad.com, jsw@netscape.com and Christian Wettergren <cwe@Csli.Stanford.EDU> Christian Wettergren <cwe@Csli.Stanford.EDU> wrote: ...
| If I only ever give out a hash of my seed, and only ever *add* any received | info to my seed (and stir it in well), how can anyone find out anything? | (Apart from hash weaknesses.)
Giving out contribution: MD5(select_bits(my_seed, start_bit, stop_bit)) -> remote Taking in contribution : my_seed = my_seed XOR ((select_low_bits(remote_contrib, contrib_width) << contrib_area)
Hmm, I use: taking-in: seed = MD5(seed,new-data) giving-out: MD5(seed) (where every giving-out is preceded by a taking-in). Is that OK? If not, why not and how can I improve it?
You also need to keep track of who has contributed what, and how much. ...
Why? I guess to keep track of how much entropy I believe I have...
This might become a problem if you don't have a safe authentification mechanism, like baseing the tracking on the IP-numbers etc.
That's a safe authentication mechanism? I don't think so. But you need a secrecy mechanism, so I guess that's where you'd add your auth. ...
The boot-strap stage is actually the big problem still. But if the ...
The boot-strap is done only once (at install time) so it's not a big problem to ask for lots of random text from user. ...
| In any case, accepting donations of entropy cannot possibly reduce the | amount of entropy I have, can it?
This isn't a problem as I see it, he'll only know what bits he flipped, not the actual state.
Good, I thought so. Sorry, have to go now, rest later... Jiri - -- <jirib@cs.monash.edu.au> <jiri@melb.dialix.oz.au> PGP 463A14D5 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2i iQCVAwUBMGIpgixV6mvvBgf5AQGRggQAwEcY+5N0stTbWXfXg3zQ6FNdzv9Sckds 3xAjLbxr85jS98Sj0Nm++DwS674U8YfrNzTRg3HnOBUcS+i8UvP445jtj4UiyxU8 hyM2ZvzBWjFuj35jXF4KR5XotZyvAsAcICsssv0UQZ3JKWV+tU/pN8sZ3sgKRRWZ ipvAFyY+rhA= =1d8P -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----