[Cryptography] ideas for (long) Nothing up my sleeve numbers

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Tue Apr 1 09:30:13 EDT 2014


<dan at geer.org> writes:

>Would you like to borrow my (first edition) copy of RAND's _One Million
>Random Digits_, buy your own reprint ($60 USD), or tell me what it is that I
>am missing here?

The fact that the random digits are slightly biased:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/a_million_rando.html#c119029

There are also persistent rumours that a representative from the Signal
Security Agency / Armed Forces Security Agency that existed at the time the
numbers were created, a certain H.Celine, somehow influenced the creation of
the list, thus the lack of information about how they were actually generated.
These concerns go back even further though, to the sneaky introduction of the
digit zero, which appears in nearly 10% of the "Random Digits" entries, by
Arab infiltrators into Iberia in the 11th century.  So overall a highly
suspect work whose origins are far too murky to make it suitable for
cryptographic use.

Peter.



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