On Wed, 15 Sep 2021 11:12:06 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: >I am not sure I really understand but wouldn't the web site be computing the >hash on the ASCII representation of ABCabcAB12345678 while the mainframe would >be computing the hash on the EBCDIC representation of ABCabcAB12345678? Those >would be different hash values. The hash computation is on the "bits" of the >key not the "letters" as you see them. > What does a "HASH" have to do with a "seed"? Isn't a hash algorithm such as SHA-1 deterministic, repeatable, so that (e.g.) CSNBOWH will produce the same result for a given message every time? (I verified the availability of CSNBOWH by passing it "Hello, World!' and verifying the output.)
Does ICSF's random number generator support seeding? This seems undesirable for cryptography. A colleague once suggested that for Monte Carlo numerical analysis it's valuable to have a repeatable random number stream while varying other parameters of a model. But that depends on the algorithm's not relying on acceptance-rejection. Is ICSF's PRNG truly "psudo"? I understand that on recent z hardware folds in true randomness when available (comparing the output of two unstable oscillators.) And is ICSF's RNG local to a job, not susceptible to any other job's stealing part of the stream, making the behavior unpredictable even for a known initial state? And the suggestion of translating the message to hex and hashing the hex stream can fail depending on whether the hex is represented in ASCII or EBCDIC. And newline conversion: <CR>, <LF>, or <CRLF>? And I've suffered from transfer agents that pad or strip trailing blanks or discard empty lines. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
