Thomas DuBuisson <[email protected]> wrote: > Vincent has done great work for Haskell+Crypto so I think he knows I > mean nothing personal when I say cprng-aes has the right idea done the > wrong way. Why a new effort vs Vincent's package? > > 1. cprng-aes is painfully slow. > 2. It doesn't use NI instructions (or any C implementation, > currently). > 3. It isn't backtracking resistent. I plan to follow the SP and test > against the KATs.
I can't really tell whether the first two points are true. If they are, they should be really easy to fix and don't really require a new package possibly with yet another interface. The great thing about cprng-aes is its simplicity. It fulfills the design requirements for an opaque, secure cryptographic library. When you use the Crypto-API interface it's really difficult to use the generator incorrectly. About the third point: This should be easy to fix and would probably be the only breaking change (in that it would generate different sequences than before). However, it is questionable whether you want AES at all in this case. A hash function-based PRNG would probably be better. This could indeed justify a new library. On the other hand you want NI instructions. In any case I would contact Vincent about all this. It would be great if those changes could be incorporated transparently. > 4. Lots of people still use "random" by default, so it would be good > to have StdGen be something reasonable, where "reasonable" is from as > many perspectives as we can manage. Of course this is not cprng-aes' fault, so this point is one of its own unrelated to my original response. StdGen is really unfortunate and should be replaced, but by what? In an older thread this question turned out to be difficult to answer. An AES-based PRNG would probably be a good compromise, but that is only my opinion. Greets, Ertugrul -- Key-ID: E5DD8D11 "Ertugrul Soeylemez <[email protected]>" FPrint: BD28 3E3F BE63 BADD 4157 9134 D56A 37FA E5DD 8D11 Keysrv: hkp://subkeys.pgp.net/
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