*1 "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann
That said, it seems that most of these attacks on Pseudorandom generators some of which are deliberately flawed, can be ameliorated somewhat by using a known-good (if slow) Pseudorandom generator. If we were to take the compromised products, rip out the PRNG's, and replace them with Blum-Blum-Shub generators, we would have products that work more slowly -- spending something like an order of magnitude more time on the generation of Pseudorandom bits -- but the security of those bits would be subject to an actual mathematical proof that prediction of the next really is at least equal in difficulty to a known-size factoring problem. Factoring problems apparently aren't as hard as we used to think but they *are* still pretty darn hard. Slow or not, I think we do need to have at least one option available in most PRNG-using systems which comes with a mathematical proof that prediction is GUARANTEED to be hard. Otherwise it's too easy for people and businesses to be caught absolutely flatfooted and have no recourse when a flawed PRNG is discovered or a trust issue requires them to do something heroic in order to convince customers that the customers' data can actually be safe. We've been basing our notion of security on the idea that others don't know something we don't know -- which is sort of nebulous on its face and of course can never be provable. We can't really change that until/unless we can say something definite about P=NP, but we're a lot more sure that nobody else has anything definite to say about P=NP than we are about most crypto primitives. Do we know of anything faster than BBS that comes with a real mathematical proof that prediction is at least as hard as $SOME_KNOWN_HARD_PROBLEM ? Bear _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography