[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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