VIFF itself as well as most protocols implemented in VIFF uses the viff.util package for random number generation. This package in turn uses the random package in the Python standard library. This means that random numbers are generated using a Mersenne twister.
As far as I can see, this is a problem, since Mersenne twister PRNGs are generally not suited for cryptographic usage. E.g. it is not known to pass the "next-bit test" and withstand the "state compromise extensions", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator. One solution would be to use the os.urandom() function instead. This has specifically been designed to produce cryptographically secure random numbers. (We should probably keep the old random generator, too. It is probably faster and not all random numbers used in VIFF and VIFF programs need to be cryptographically secure.) Let me know what you think about this. Kind regards, Thomas _______________________________________________ viff-devel mailing list (http://viff.dk/) viff-devel@viff.dk http://lists.viff.dk/listinfo.cgi/viff-devel-viff.dk
