[Cryptography] New White Paper: GhostLine - Information-Theoretically Secure Multi-Party Chat
Kent Borg
kentborg at borg.org
Mon Sep 8 19:13:09 EDT 2025
On 9/8/25 2:40 PM, Tony Patti wrote:
> XORing 4 of the crystal oscillators (in hardware) was VERY GOOD,
> XORing 16 of the crystal oscillators was EXCELLENT.
I like it.
As I think about it a little I worry about RF coupling between the
oscillators, but these aren't easily persuadable RC oscillators, these
each have a rather stubborn crystal at the heart, keeping them very
independent. Fun.
It reminds me of my favorite entropy source in this era: The multi-GHz
system clock counter deep inside a modern CPU, beating against the
servicing of an interrupt source, /any/ interrupt source, the more
interrupt sources the merrier. For those relative timings to be known
precisely off-chip seems at minimum hard. And to know those relative
timings at any distance seems impossible. It feels like some sort of
Heisenberg-like effect should make it /theoretically/ impossible, but
I'm satisfied with how practically impossible it seems.
Now xor it with the built-in——even if not honestly built——CPU random
number generator, and things get even better. To sleep extra soundly
quietly slide the phase of between these different sources now and then
by some unadvertised amount, and even the crooked ones are very useful.
-kb
P.S. Isn't there someone here who now should start using the word
"squish"? I think that was it.
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