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Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 11:06:09 -0400
From: Jean-Luc Cooke <jlcooke@certainkey.com>
To: linux@horizon.com
Cc: daw@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu, tytso@mit.edu, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       mpm@selenic.com
Subject: Re: Fortuna
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On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 11:10:33AM -0000, linux@horizon.com wrote:
> Thank you for pointing out the paper; Appendix A is particularly
> interesting.  And the [BST03] reference looks *really* nice!  I haven't
> finished it yet, but based on what I've read so far, I'd like to
> *strongly* recommnd that any would-be /dev/random hackers read it
> carefully.  It can be found at
> http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~tromer/papers/rng.pdf
> 
> Happily, it *appears* to confirm the value of the LFSR-based input
> mixing function.  Although the suggested construction in section 4.1 is
> different, and I haven't seen if the proof can be extended.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but uniformity of the linear function isn't
sufficant even if we implemented like this (right now it's more a+X than
a <dot> X).

The part which suggests choosing an irreducible poly and a value "a" in the
preprocessing stage ... last I checked the value for a and the poly need to
be secret.  How do you generate poly and a, Catch-22?  Perhaps I'm missing
something and someone can point it out.

JLC
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