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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:05
Enzo Michelangeli (em@who.net)
Sun, 24 Jan 1999 19:13:45 -0500
-----Original Message-----
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
To: CodherPlunks@toad.com <CodherPlunks@toad.com>
Date: Monday, January 25, 1999 3:16 AM
>At 09:40 AM 1/24/99 +0800, Enzo Michelangeli wrote:
>> Dr M wrote:
>>>Well, no compressor works on the random bits I get, and it does pass
>>>DIEHARD, so it's as random as I know how to measure.
>>
>>No compressor <<that you tried>>, you mean. But the number of possible
>>algorithms is infinite, and someone knowing a design weakness could well
>>exploit it to design a way of reducing the number of equivalent bits.
D'you
>>remember the case of Netscape Navigator?
>>
>>Enzo
>
>While philosophically true, this is garbage. Particularly since Dr. M is
>using
>physical source.
So? Besides the fact that all sources are "physical" (are there spiritual
data sources?), they may contain biases that make their output somehow
predictable by someone with sufficient insight; still, the bias may be
non-linear enough not to show up up in any common statistical test (as,
e.g., the one from a low-pass filter would, making the noise pink). Here is
an example: Dr M (or Intel) builds a generator whose output alternates
between a perfect, quantum-based RNG, and a totally deterministic PRNG.
The output is still statistically perfect, but those who know the design
may forecast half of the bits; the entropy is not higher than 50% of the
bit rate.
Enzo
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:05