From: aba@dcs.exeter.ac.uk
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 95 14:14:54 PDT
To: trei@process.com ("Peter Trei")
Subject: Re: SSL CHALLENGE: ALERT! probable misallocation of keys?
Message-ID: <13538.9508242114@exe.dcs.exeter.ac.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Peter Trei <trei@process.com> writes on cpunks:
> My suspicion - and let me apologize in advance if I'm wrong - is
> that Mr. Thomas thinks he's allocated himself 50,000 keys, whereas
> he's actually got 838,860,800,000.

A quite plausible theory, hadn't thought of that.

> You've reserved 3/4 of the keyspace, and you're going to screw up the 
> search unless you have an NSA-sized data center.
> 
> I suggest we assume this is an error, and remove the block from the
> reserved list so that it can be re-allocated.

Piete's server is more reslient than that!

What happens is that when it reaches FFFF, it'll start doling out yet
unacked keys on the assumption that they were mistakes, or that they
were slow machines, or WWW doled ones which the user forgot to ack.

This is better for speed reasons also, as it means everybody gets
something to do right up to the end, there'll be a mad scrabble at the
end where multiple people are working on the same keyspace, as it
wraps around the remaining unacked bits of key, but the 1st person to
ack gets credited for it, and that way it gets done as quickly as
possible.

Adam