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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:25
Anonymous (nobody@replay.com)
Tue, 2 Feb 1999 19:18:52 +0100
At 08:52 AM 2/2/99 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>
>Bruce Schneier <schneier@counterpane.com> writes:
>> At 11:41 PM 2/1/99 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> >Speaking of Montecarlo, I've been wondering for some time:
>> >
>> >Is RC4 a good PRNG for monte carlo types? I mean, its a very good PRNG
>> >-- is it good enough for *non*-cryptographic use?
>>
>> I would think so. If it has problems in Monte Carlo tests, that would be a
>> VERY interesting cryptographic result.
>
>That's what I've always thought -- if there is *any* bad property from
>a Monte Carlo point of view it will be far worse from a cryptography
>point of view. HOWEVER, that seems to imply that there is no point in
>using linear congruential generators, since RC4 is trivial to code and
>use (insignificantly harder than a LCPRNG), and is far better at being
>random!
Some of the tests in Diehard (and other tests of 'randomness')
are in fact monte carlo sims with a priori known outputs.
Many classical PRNG schemes, such as the LCPRNG, are dinosaurs
from the age when expensive hardware ruled. Consider DES's design vs.
a modern cpu-friendly block cipher. Like Herr Feistel would have spent
over four thousand bits on lookup tables, or done a funky-multiply
to avoid them!
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:25