Hey, In Maurer's paper, which is the last link here on the following page, he proposes to use a public random "pad" to encrypt the plaintext based on bits selected by a key. What I'm wondering is why he chose the strange construction for encryption; namely, that he uses an additive (mod 2) cipher where each plaintext bit is (apparently) XORed against K bits from the random pad. He also uses a 2-d array structure, both of which appear kind of arbitrary to me.
http://www.crypto.ethz.ch/research/itc/samba/ Does anyone have information on: 1) Deep space sources or terrestrial satellite transmissions which could be used as publicly-available random bits 2) The nature of noise, especially the noise when a receiver is de-tuned (I have heard ~1% of this signal power is cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang, and that the rest is largely a mystery) -- Security Guru for Hire http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/ -><- GPG fingerprint: 9D3F 395A DAC5 5CCC 9066 151D 0A6B 4098 0C55 1484 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]