On Aug 25, 2010, at 4:37 16PM, travis+ml-cryptogra...@subspacefield.org wrote:

> 
> 3) Is determinism a good idea?
> See Debian OpenSSL fiasco.  I have heard Nevada gaming commission
> regulations require non-determinism for obvious reasons.

It's worth noting that the issue of determinism vs. non-determinism is by no 
means clearcut.  You yourself state that FIPS 140-2 requires deterministic 
PRNGs; I think one can rest assured that the NSA had a lot of input into that 
spec.  The Clipper chip programming facility used a PRNG to set the unit key -- 
and for good reasons, not bad ones.

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb





---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com

Reply via email to