[Cryptography] Ah, The Circles of Life

[Steven Bellovin]

On Nov 6, 2013, at 9:38 35AM, Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> I saw a tweet by Bruce Schneier about elliptic curve cryptography, recommending an article on Ars Technica.
> 
> I start reading it, am reminded of the mysteriously chosen parameters of the NIST RNG, and that I read about how to choose such things in a public and honest way.
> 
> And that for makes me wonder about pi, but in hex.  (Can't remember the question before, but all things are new to me at least once.)  So I google "pi in hex".
> 

What makes you think that purely random parameters are good?
Sometimes they aren't -- think s-boxes.


		--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb