3 ms·
Maybe OT, but what's PKRNG?
by danielweber 13y ago
Maybe OT, but what's PKRNG?
- tptacek 13y agoPublic-key RNG; an RNG that has asymmetric structure. The concept of PKRNG and how it ever could be innocuous got debated on Twitter last year, and (I think) Matt Blaze pointed out that you might want one in order to constrain the number of different math/crypto operations you relied on in your protocol. If your security already depends on number-theoretic crypto because (for instance) you use DSA, you might think "in for a penny, in for a pound" regarding discrete log, and use an RNG that has the exact same dependency; the thought might be that there's only one thing that could then go wrong to destroy your security, not several. That said: PKRNGs are weird, uncommon, and (in 2013-2014) very shady. They're also very slow. Nobody uses them.