[HacDC:Byzantium] cjdns review

CodesInChaos codesinchaos at gmail.com
Mon Nov 26 09:26:51 PST 2012


> Two things. First of all, wouldn't brute-forcing the key generation
> exhaust the entropy available in /dev/random and force the use of less
> random bits from /dev/urandom?

Once properly seeded, /dev/urandom is good enough. The main issue with it
is initial seeding and not using up entropy.

> Also, don't the public/private keys need
> to be based on prime numbers, not just random numbers? The strength of
> RSA is the assumption that factorization of large _prime_ numbers is
> mathematically a hard problem to solve.

CJDNS doesn't use RSA. It uses elliptic curve crypto, specifically
Curve25519,
where a private key is just a random number. No need for being a prime.





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list