[CentOS] Elliptic curve on Centos 6.x

Fri Jan 3 16:37:35 UTC 2014
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at alice.it>

Luigi Rosa wrote:


>> Is this a meaningful statement? How do you measure the "entropy" of a
>> seed (which I take to be a string)? And if you can, is it true that you
>> can decrypt a string with low entropy?

You deleted the statement I queried. Here it is
"With headless and/or virtual servers the issue is even bigger because Linux
could not be able to collect enough entropy to seed /dev/urandom"

> The mathematic behind a PRNG (or DRNG to use NIST terminolgy) + Elliptic
> Curve falls beyond my comprehension, so I have to take for granted what
> experts say.

I don't believe in "proof by expertise".
You used the work "entropy".
I'm asking what you mean by it.

> The link to PDF I qoted in my previous message goes deep in detail, you
> can refer to that paper if you need more informations.

You used the word.
I'm asking what you meant by it.

> There are some models that define or analyze if a sequence is "randomic"
> you can google around or take a look at
> http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/ais31.html

The nearest this comes to a definition of "empirical" entropy is
"Accumulate the nearest predecessor distance between byte values 
in a 256000 + 2560 bit sequence and calculate the empirical entropy" 

On this basis the digits of pi are random,
in which case it would be easy to supply random numbers.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland