3 ms·
You might be interested in reading about Fortuna https://www.schneier.com/academic/fortuna/ https://www.schneier.com/academic/fortuna/. It's an example of a cla
by sowbug 9y ago
You might be interested in reading about Fortuna https://www.schneier.com/academic/fortuna/ https://www.schneier.com/academic/fortuna/. It's an example of a class of PRNGs that are explicitly designed to generate cryptographically secure random numbers from a pool of sources including sources under an attacker's control.
I don't know the first thing about cryptanalysis, but what I gather from skimming the PDF is that yes, it's possible to advantageously influence a PRNG with bad inputs if the mixer sucks.
- tptacek 9y agoThis is a feature of basically every modern CSPRNG and a basic consequence of the crypto primitives we use to design CSPRNGs.
- sowbug 9y agoThat's good to hear. It seems intuitive that it should be impractical to usefully influence randomness; if I can predict anything after a whitening step, isn't that whitening step horribly broken? But I've learned to squelch my intuition when it comes to cryptography. (Now would be a great time to plug Matasano...)