Re: Newbie question(s)...

From: Jonathan Baker (jonathanrbaker_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/19/03 

Date: 19 Sep 2003 13:36:41 -0700

> [ M. K. Shen ]
> Some comments based on my poor knowledge: It would be
> advantageous that you also have (secret) offsets, i.e.
> starting to use bits from certain locations of the bit
> sequences.
I was thinking of that as well... (sort of assumed that in the back of
my mind somewhere...)

> [ M. K. Shen ]
> The idea of selection of bits of one sequence
> depending on another sequence is not new. (cf. shrinking
> generators.
Heeeyyy... I remember hearing of those (shrinking generators)!
.oO(wow, I feel smarter already...) :)

> [ M. K. Shen ]
> I had a humble stream cipher design utilizing
> similar idea.) You could also further process a number
> of such resulting bit sequences in some ways, e.g. xor-ing
> them together or doing sort of von-Neumann unbiasing, etc.
> etc.
I've heard of von-Neuman, what's this unbiasing???
Have any notes/code for your "humble stream cipher" that you would
like to share???

> [ M. K. Shen ]
> Heuristically, it is reasonable to expect that you
> would obtain results that are quite satisfactory, though
> it's hard (I would think impossible) to have rigorous
> evaluations of them (through formal mathematical means).
All we know for sure is that in the best of all possible worlds, a
true one-time pad would be the most secure option right?

That whole notion of an infinite number of monkeys (with typewritters)
comes to mind...

Anyway, thanks for the input!
J. R. Baker

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