Luigi Rosa wrote:
>> Is this a meaningful statement? How do you measure the "entropy" of a
>> seed (which I take to be a string)? And if you can, is it true that you
>> can decrypt a string with low entropy?
You deleted the statement I queried. Here it is
"With headless and/or virtual servers the issue is even bigger because Linux
could not be able to collect enough entropy to seed /dev/urandom"
> The mathematic behind a PRNG (or DRNG to use NIST terminolgy) + Elliptic
> Curve falls beyond my comprehension, so I have to take for granted what
> experts say.
I don't believe in "proof by expertise".
You used the work "entropy".
I'm asking what you mean by it.
> The link to PDF I qoted in my previous message goes deep in detail, you
> can refer to that paper if you need more informations.
You used the word.
I'm asking what you meant by it.
> There are some models that define or analyze if a sequence is "randomic"
> you can google around or take a look at
> http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/ais31.html
The nearest this comes to a definition of "empirical" entropy is
"Accumulate the nearest predecessor distance between byte values
in a 256000 + 2560 bit sequence and calculate the empirical entropy"
On this basis the digits of pi are random,
in which case it would be easy to supply random numbers.
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
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