Robert H. has asked that we reply in e-mail to him, to avoid "cluttering the list more than I already have...," but the logic of this is faulty. The few lines of a response such as this one, or even of several such responses, are as nothing compared to dozens or more people sifting their own archives so they can each independently send Robert what they find. Hence my public reply. Robert Hettinga wrote:
I casually mentioned somewhere else that I saw something on this list about floating-point math being used in crypto, contrary to popular belief, and somebody had the *timerity* to call me on it. ;-).
I think it had to do with factoring, but maybe even in key-generation, though that doesn't sound right at all...
The thread was "Pentium bug and CRYPTO," and it hit on 1994-11-21 and lasted a few days. Posts by Derek Atkins, Mike Duvos, and others stated persuasively that no floating point operations are included in PGP, that no FP coprocessor is needed or used for PGP, and that the Pentium bug could not affect PGP. (In another thread, which I have no intention of trying to dig up now, though I recall either Norm Hardy or Hal Finney was one of those to comment, it was noted that some clever uses of floating point hardware can help with ostensibly integer-only computations. But PGP, as noted above, does not do this, and I expect this trick is not common.)
So, are there c-punk archives I could look in? I remember hearing something about that, too.
However, if someone remembers off the top of their head, or if they have an actual copy of the posting, that would be great, too.
Please send me whatever it is by e-mail. No point cluttering the list more than I already have...
(I will send Robert several of these article, so others don't have to. Game theory and all that good stuff.)
Of all the nerve....
Not to sound strident, but if folks would keep copies of articles and spend some time organizing them in data bases or in other searchable forms, this would help the list. In my opinion, having personal access to past posts is several orders of magnitude more important than having MIDI-MIME JPEG-II TeX players that can display "Cypherpunks R Us" in the correct font and with the "R" reversed according to spec. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo@toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tc/tcmay