[Cryptography] New White Paper: GhostLine - Information-Theoretically Secure Multi-Party Chat

[Peter Gutmann]

Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> writes:

>I long ago decided that it doesn't matter whether the number is "truly"
>random (whatever that is), only that it be unguessable by whomever one wants
>to keep out of ones business.

That's what I've used in entropy/key generators I've been involved with, some
sort of noise source, a unique (secret) seed, and a counter, all combined
through a hash function.  Noise sources are always somewhat unreliable but the
secret value and incrementing counter will guarantee unknown-to-an-attacker
output even if the noise source fails entirely or is compromised.  In the case
of the counter you can also verify that it's still moving for each new output,
while guessing whether a noise source is still being useful is quite another
matter.

Peter.