Hi, now it's not about information technology any more but about math and the difficulty to properly discuss a mathematical opinion.
Zenaan Harkness wrote: > Which myth? The one denounced by Thomas Huehn's article. Saying that /dev/random gets fed directly from the entropy pool: https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/structure-no.png Zenaan Harkness wrote: > > > I should have wrote "/dev/random should be treated as though it is > > > the input feed to /dev/urandom" (sorry about that). I wrote: > > But that it isn't. The myth model says that it would be. > I can't see the myth in my words that you say is debunked The word "myth" refers to the topic and title the article, not to your words. I apologize for any implied belittleing of your arguments. It was not intentional. > Exactly which part of my sentence above, do you say contradicts what > you say just here? The part that /dev/urandom is equivalent to stemming from /dev/random. They are more or less siblings, according to Thomas Huehn and Andy Smith. > > not a strongly obfuscated but still diluted result. > Yes, your naivety shines through. I am not alone with that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator "A CSPRNG can "stretch" the available entropy over more bits." (The authors of that page throw much more math terms than have been in this thread yet. Whether this makes them more credible stays undecided.) Maybe the answer by Jalai in https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1740/stretching-a-random-seed-to-maximize-entropy points out a lower limit for the loss of entropy by exploiting the key of a cipher. Maybe it's a red herring. > This is not the place to gain a deep understanding of > cryptographically secure random numbers You tell me that if i read 1024 bytes from a not very secret stream that was encrypted with a secret 384 bit key i get 1024 bytes of entropy ? I'd like to read the proof for this. > If you want to comprehend the significance of your naivety, find the > number of molecules in the universe, What does this have to do with the question whether N bits of information can give birth to more than N bits of information ? > you're going down completely non-productive rabbit holes, I would like to know how one can be so sure that the holes are not productive. > without spending the necessary effort to learn about the maths, Oh. It's not the math. It's the jumps in the argumentation and the lack of proof for strong statements. I can be convinced. Just give me links to convincing texts. Have a nice day :) Thomas
