From: Jay Holovacs <holovacs@styx.ios.com>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 23:04:27 +0800
To: cypherpunks <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Re: why compression doesn't perfectly even out entropy
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9604180640.A22694-0100000@styx.ios.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Perhaps keyspace analysis and randomness analysis should be done from a 
Bayesian technique, with the the potential perspective of the cracker, or 
your estimate of the potental prospective of the cracker as a priori 
conditions.

Hamlet could well qualify as a random string, however if your cracker was 
using 'Great Books of Western Civ' as a dictionary source, it would not 
be so good.

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Jay Holovacs <holovacs@ios.com>
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PGP Key fingerprint =  AC 29 C8 7A E4 2D 07 27  AE CA 99 4A F6 59 87 90 

On Wed, 17 Apr 1996, Simon Spero wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Apr 1996, Mark Rogaski wrote:
> 
> > Is it possible to find a percentage of the key space to eliminate that
> > will optimize security assuming that the attacker will try the easy
> > stuff first (and is it possible to quantify "easy stuff")?
> 
> Hmmm- I think this could be interesting to study; if we treat the space 
> of possible passwords as a non-uniform probability distribution 
> (Zipfian?), and then transform it in such a way to be uniform (by 
> having the probability of certain passwords being disqualified be 
> based on their relative probability it should be possible to get a 
> situation where all passwords are possible, and all have equal probability.