John W. Moore III wrote: > Robert is a professional Mathematician and actually _loves_ Numbers.
I'm a software engineer nowadays, although my college degrees are on the math-heavy side of theoretical computer science. I think it's fair to call me a mathematician, but I'm not sure I can be said to do it professionally. > You _will_ learn if You read/study the Answer from a Guy who buys gas > and I'm sure occasionally says to the Cashier "gimme a Quick Pick on > the Fantasy 5" knowing full well that the odds of winning are a > gazillion to 1. Actually, there's a funny story about the last time I did that. I was delivering a paper on destructive visual cryptography, and was stumbling around to find a 'feelie' to distribute to the profs to make it more tangible for them. Then I figured it out: scratch-off lottery tickets, appropriately marked up. That led to my last lottery purchase. > entropy? CPRNG? glyph? Please bear in mind that this is a 'public' > List and if at all possible Post in 'laymen's terms' or risk > confusing Every One else who reads this forum. All the terms/words > are valid but without Full explanation You are attempting to benefit > without 'sharing' with everyone else. [soapbox put away] Sorry -- explanations follow. Entropy is uncertainty, represented as the logarithm base-two of how many possibilities there are. For a random person, their driver's license has either 'M' or 'F' as your sex, so they have one bit (log2 of 2) of entropy (uncertainty) in their gender. (Fun fact: you can tell mathematicians apart from computer scientists by asking them for the fundamental unit of entropy. A CS guy will say the 'bit'. A math guy will say the 'nat'. The mathematics version of entropy is found by computing the natural log of the possibilities, not the log-base-2 of the possibilities. Hence, 'nat'. There are about 1.44 bits per nat.) A good passphrase will have 64+ bits of entropy. A great passphrase will have 128 bits. There's not much point beyond that. Glyph = one symbol in a language. It could be a single English letter, a single Chinese ideogram, or a single Hangul phoneme. The more glyphs in your passphrase, the more entropy you have (usually). English accumulates about 1.5 bits of entropy per glyph. CSPRNG = cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. An algorithm that spits out random-looking garbage. Different from a PRNG, in that a cryptanalyst can often "break" (learn how to predict) PRNG outputs; but CSPRNGs are hardened against these attacks. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
