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From: daw@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner)
Newsgroups: isaac.lists.linux-kernel
Subject: Re: Fortuna
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 01:08:47 +0000 (UTC)
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>First, a reminder that the design goal of /dev/random proper is
>information-theoretic security.  That is, it should be secure against
>an attacker with infinite computational power.

I am skeptical.
I have never seen any convincing evidence for this claim,
and I suspect that there are cases in which /dev/random fails
to achieve this standard.

And it seems I am not the only one.  See, e.g., Section 5.3 of:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/029

Fortunately, it doesn't matter whether /dev/random provides
information-theoretic security.  I have reasonable confidence that
it provides computational security, and that is all that applications
need.
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