Re: Magic Numbers in MD5

[geeman@best.com]

digits of transcendental functions are conjectured to be randomly distributed.
however, some specifics of how the sin() function was utilized in MD5
were the basis for a successful attack on the compression function.  I don't 
recall the references.  not too hard to find tho.



..snip..

>> Does abs(sin()) have some properties that are especially conducive to
>> strengthening MD5 or is it just a function to generate mildly random
>> numbers?  If the latter, wouldn't the algorithm be stronger if it was
>> used with completely random numbers?
>
>I am not sure of the properties of abs(sin()).  I know that the S-boxes in
>Blowfish are initialized with pi.  I would guess that the purpose of using
>such values is to use easily generated pseudo-random numbers.
>
>Mark
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