On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 08:53:02PM +0100, RW wrote: > On Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:28:51 +0200 Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote: > > so none of it is discarded. My gut feeling is that compression is > > better than hashing for that purpose, > > It's analogous to a passphrase, have you ever heard of a > passphrase being compressed rather than hashed? > > The only good reason for compression is if compression+hashing is > faster than hashing, and that sounds unlikely.
Good to see someone have thoughts on this. I've only seen it stated that entropy passes thru mostly "untouched" thru a cryptographic hash in the literature. I haven't seen anything mentioned about entropy thru a compression algorithm other than as an estimation of entropy. > You all seem to be making very heavy weather of this - all that's needed > is to pass the low-grade stuff through a hash of your choice and then > follow that with the entropy file to fill-up the remaining 4k. Or fill-up the 4k buffers with high-quality entropy, and add in the low-grade stuff if there is room. -- -- David ([email protected]) _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-rc To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
