Re: OTP seed solution? - strong, tried before???

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

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On Tue, 17 Sep 1996 paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk wrote:

> A very simple idea came to me today that I`m sure has been done 
> before and I wanted to find out if it has any problems I haven`t 
> seen:
> 
> A strong random generator (ie. a BBS) is seeded with a true random 
> seed (derived possibly from keyboard latency) and used each time a 
> message is send to create a message length randon string.
> 
> This string is XOR`d or added to the message creating a OTP.
> 
> The recipient has previously been sent a seed value for the generator 
> encrypted under say RSA and signed to prevent a man in the middle 
> attack.

That's the definition of a stream cipher.  BBS is rather slow and is dependant
on the difficulty of factoring large numbers.  Of course, if the keys are
distributed using RSA or Rabin, then the strength of the system depends on the
difficulty of factoring numbers anyway.  There are many stream ciphers that
are fast and secure.  I generally like to use a block cipher in CFB or OFB
mode rather than a stream cipher, but they are basically the same thing.

Mark
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