From: paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:25:21 -0700 (PDT)
To: Andrew Loewenstern <andrew_loewenstern@il.us.swissbank.com>
Subject: Re: Random numbers for DES search.
Message-ID: <846173714.7575.0@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> I wrote:
> >  Yep.  You don't need unpredictability or other attributes that
> >  are usually necessary for crypto PRNGs.  Basically all you
> >  need is a good uniform distribution.  A quality PRNG like the
> >  ones used for simulations and games will work fine.  No need
> >  to use Blum-Blum-Shub or other fancy (and slow) generators.
> >  A linear-congruential generator or an LFSR would probably do
> >  the trick.

This really doesn`t seem a good idea to me seeing as not only are we 
going to be wasting time on an LFSR runtime wise but we will be 
covering a lot of duplicate keyspace, if you look at the mersenne 
prime finding exercise which has its homepages somewhere on 
compuserve (i`ll give the address if you need it but I can`t remember 
it at the moment) they have a set of numerical blocks of exponent 
space that are allocated to people then removed from the list, not an 
option of course if we are going to be "stealing" runtime, unless we 
do it on networked workstations using some sort of UDP packet or 
similar.

 

  Datacomms Technologies web authoring and data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
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     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"