DESCrack keyspace partitioning

Douglas B. Renner dougr at skypoint-gw.globelle.com
Fri Oct 4 16:03:30 PDT 1996


On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, geeman at best.com wrote:


> Seems to me that a _subset_ of all possible keys is much more likely
> to appear than a random selection from an equidistributed population 0..2^56.

This is a contradiction.  Unless you were defining "subset" using a 
specific weakness in a specific RNG, in which case your argument would 
have been a tautology, saying nothing.

> (P)RNG's just aren't that likely to produce a key of 010101010.....
> nor 001100110011... etc etc and I have been thinking about how one might formalize 
> and exploit this randomness property to increase the probability of finding the key sooner.

RNG's are written to maximize randomness of of the numerical _value_ of 
the integer, independent of any arbitrary radix, including 
binary.

The "property" you describe is imaginary.  Like the Gambler's Fallacy, 
it's an artifact of our own cognitive functioning, and does not exist in 
the real world.

. . .
The radix is 13.
The answer is 42.
The question is "What do you get when you multiply 6 by 9?"

Let any search begin with self-knowledge...    Douglas B. Renner









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