From: gtoal@an-teallach.com (Graham Toal)
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 93 11:32:30 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Sarah's Bio
Message-ID: <5816@an-teallach.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


In article <199311051657.IAA20001@mail.netcom.com> doug@netcom.com writes:
 > ogr@wyvern.wyvern.com (Jason Plank) said:
 > >       Phil Zimmerman solved this problem by supplying the source code for
 > >his product.  You can see for yourself that there are no backdoors.
 > 
 > This helps, but is imperfect. How many people will read their particular
 > copy in sufficient detail to ascertain that there aren't any obvious
 > backdoors added by e.g. a sneaky archive site maintainer, or some sneaky
 > cracker who found a way to modify the archived copy?

Well, I did for one.  Some of you may remember me posting to sci.crypt
quite some time ago, because the one thing I wasn't happy about was the
use of a probabilistic primality tester when there were completely
certain primality tests available (albeit a bit more expensive in cpu).
(especially since I didn't understand how the probabilistic one worked)

I see from a posting on sci.crypt today that the probabilistic tests
have been show to be possibly mildly weak in some infrequent cases.
Probably not worth worrying about, but still, it's a sobering thought.

The rest of the code I understood well enough to trust it, mostly :)

G
--
Personal mail to gtoal@gtoal.com (I read it in the evenings)
Business mail to gtoal@an-teallach.com (Be careful with the spelling!)
Faxes to An Teallach Limited: +44 31 662 4678  Voice: +44 31 668 1550 x212