From: mjr@TIS.COM
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 93 09:49:20 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re:  Random Numbers
Message-ID: <18957.9309161647@otter.TIS.COM>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



	I admit I'm guilty of being somewhat ignorant of how PGP
implements randseed.bin.  My experience with PGP indicates that
it's pretty well-thought-out in general, so perhaps I'm repeating
the obvious.

	One possibility is to treat part of the random seed as
if it was your secret RSA key. Systems like PEM store the RSA
key encrypted on disk someplace - you could also store an
encrypted random seed which you decrypt when you retrieve the
secret key, use to bootstrap your PRNG, and then replace with
some output from the PRNG when you're done. That way, the seed
is (by definition) hidden, and an attacker is going to have
much more trouble attacking your PRNG by searching your random
seed space.

mjr.