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Couldn't you generate an arbitrarily large number of variations of vaguely human meaningful sentences, until one of them ended up with a convenient hash? The se

Couldn't you generate an arbitrarily large number of variations of vaguely human meaningful sentences, until one of them ended up with a convenient hash? The sentence you wrote as an example sounds like something an ML model would spit out. Yesterday I texted my coworker a suggestion to dockerize his yocto build so that it would work better in vagrant on a lambda server in the cloud. It's borderline these days, but he realized I was being facetious. He retorted with a serious comment about 500 lines of typescript to run 5 lines of bash.

kadoban 5y ago
You could, theoretically, yes. Ideally it should be short and low entropy and you're a bit relying on laws of big numbers and a small amount of trust. "aes" is better than "aes is the best!" which is better than "aes123884586314745"
lupire 5y ago
There are a lot more 1024-bit primes than plausible sentences.
mattalex 5y ago
With "meaningful input" one usually means some prime number or the eg. first X digits of a constant like pi. (and if you chose a strange prime or constant, people would also ask questions) This generally narrows down the options to something were relatively little trickery is possible: keep in mind that the eg. hashes used to break some encryption would have to be very specific so that the algorithm isn't trivially broken to begin with. The more important part about nothing-up-my-sleeve is really the justification for choosing a particular hash/number. If, let's say your algorithm needs a prime with at least 10 digits and you pick the first prime with 10 digits nobody asks questions. If you picked the 16th, then people would ask questions. Similarly, if you can pick any arbitrary ten digit number and you pick the first 10 digits of pi, nobody will ask questions. If you picked the million'th to million-and-tenth digit of pi people would asks questions. "meaningful" has to be understood more as "from a pool of constants that leave little room for (mallicious) adjustment". The abstracter the number, the higher the potentially used searchspace.

kadoban 5y ago

You could, theoretically, yes. Ideally it should be short and low entropy and you're a bit relying on laws of big numbers and a small amount of trust. "aes" is better than "aes is the best!" which is better than "aes123884586314745"

lupire 5y ago

There are a lot more 1024-bit primes than plausible sentences.

mattalex 5y ago

With "meaningful input" one usually means some prime number or the eg. first X digits of a constant like pi. (and if you chose a strange prime or constant, people would also ask questions) This generally narrows down the options to something were relatively little trickery is possible: keep in mind that the eg. hashes used to break some encryption would have to be very specific so that the algorithm isn't trivially broken to begin with. The more important part about nothing-up-my-sleeve is really the justification for choosing a particular hash/number. If, let's say your algorithm needs a prime with at least 10 digits and you pick the first prime with 10 digits nobody asks questions. If you picked the 16th, then people would ask questions. Similarly, if you can pick any arbitrary ten digit number and you pick the first 10 digits of pi, nobody will ask questions. If you picked the million'th to million-and-tenth digit of pi people would asks questions. "meaningful" has to be understood more as "from a pool of constants that leave little room for (mallicious) adjustment". The abstracter the number, the higher the potentially used searchspace.