full-disclosure - Re: how i stopped worrying and loved the backdoor

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Message-ID: <4D146DB0.1070908@extendedsubset.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2010 03:53:52 -0600
From: Marsh Ray <marsh@...endedsubset.com>
To: coderman <coderman@...il.com>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: how i stopped worrying and loved the backdoor

> "I agree that there's a good paper in this, I would love to see the
> entropy added by the multi-consumer model quantified, or even an upper
> bound placed on it.  In the past when I've given my talk on randomness
> in the OpenBSD network stack, I've discussed this and I always ask for
> someone to come forward with such a paper.

So there are these many hundreds of lines of entropy management code in 
OpenBSD implementing what is claimed to be a novel architecture for 
random number generation and yet this guy, who is going around giving 
talks on it, is expecting someone else to quantify it and "come forward 
with a paper"?

This is the kind of stuff that just doesn't make a bit of sense.

> Unfortunately I don't get the impression that the amateur cryptographers
> questioning the OpenBSD PRNG are qualified to produce such a paper (if
> they were, they wouldn't be mailing here, they'd be submitting it to
> real cryptographers for peer review)"

The burden of proof lies with the "amateur cryptographers" making the 
security claims about it, not those questioning them.

- Marsh

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