4 ms·
Thanks 'tptacek. The point is `dd if=/dev/urandom bs=32 count=1` XOR `dd if=/dev/urandom bs=32 count=1` is not going to cancel out to be zero as some he
by marshray 13y ago
Thanks 'tptacek.
The point is
`dd if=/dev/urandom bs=32 count=1` XOR `dd if=/dev/urandom bs=32 count=1`
is not going to cancel out to be zero as some here are implying. No one is claiming that it's a net gain either though.
- DanBC 13y agoAs I understand it: You're taking a non-blocking source of randomness, and depleting its entropy pool quicker, which forces it to drop back into 'not very good random mode' quicker.
- tptacek 13y agoArgh. No, that's not what happens. Think about this for a second. It's not like the "entropic" bytes have a color, and the pool gets low on the bytes with that color.
- marshray 13y agoIt would be like that if you were looking at it decades ago when key sizes were small and cryptographers didn't have much faith in the one-way-ness of hash functions, or from the perspective of that branch of information theory which seems to permit the existence of arbitrarily powerful computers. A lot of guidance coughman pagescough is still written that way. In the real world, our computers are limited by physics. It seems that in crypto, the least controversial assumption we can make is that given enough secret bits (i.e., entropy) we can be safe from brute force attacks.