From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 10:42:56 +0800
To: bruce@omega.co.nz
Subject: Re: CD-reading for random keys
Message-ID: <199603160809.AAA01012@ix14.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:56 AM 3/14/96 GMT, bruce@omega.co.nz wrote:
>The "entropy" or randomness of audio data is LOW. That's why audio compresses
>so well. However, the idea of keeping a one-time key on CD-ROM is good. 

Actually, the idea's not real good - CDROMs are easy to keep around, 
last a long time, and are generally not eraseable - this encourages using them
as a More Than One Time Pad, which is a really bad idea.....  

Tape is better - it's easy to write garbage over it as you go along,
it doesn't have that feel of permanence about it, and it's easy to
use for something else besides selling as Musique Concre'te or 
Rainforest Ocean Background Harmonies.

If you're going to use audio as a source, even FM radio hiss (using one of
those new radio-in-your-PC cards), compress it first, then feed it
to some encryption algorithm or shove it through MD5 to lose any
remaining patterns if you can.
#--
#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281
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