digits of transcendental functions are conjectured to be randomly distributed. however, some specifics of how the sin() function was utilized in MD5 were the basis for a successful attack on the compression function. I don't recall the references. not too hard to find tho. ..snip..

...

Does abs(sin()) have some properties that are especially conducive to strengthening MD5 or is it just a function to generate mildly random numbers? If the latter, wouldn't the algorithm be stronger if it was used with completely random numbers?

I am not sure of the properties of abs(sin()). I know that the S-boxes in Blowfish are initialized with pi. I would guess that the purpose of using such values is to use easily generated pseudo-random numbers.

Mark - -- finger -l for PGP key PGP encrypted mail prefered. 0xf9b22ba5 now revoked

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