thug@phantom.com (Murdering Thug) writes,

A person I know is working on a computerized version of the OTP that extracts a truly random stream of bits from TV/RF static and massages it using a DSP to be highly variable (e.g.: no runs of 0's or 1's longer than 5 bits).

Cool! You've managed to weaken the one time pad enough for someone to crack it! [ I can collect statistics on the plaintext based on the fact that if five zeroes occur in the OTP then the next bit is constrained to be one. Of course, I don't have complete access to the OTP, but it's an extremely useful statitistical foot-in-the-door. ] This failure occurred because your friend tried to create a number sequence that is somehow "more random than random". Such a sequence is, by definition, weak. -- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)