[836] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
LavaRand Patent Application Clarified (was:RE: Tea Leaves: Ephemeral
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mullen, Patrick)
Thu May 15 12:23:21 1997
Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 11:21:15 -0400
From: "Mullen, Patrick" <Patrick.Mullen@GSC.GTE.Com>
To: "'Cryptography'" <cryptography@c2.net>
>----------
>From: Nick Szabo[SMTP:szabo@best.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 1997 9:42 PM
>To: cryptography@c2.net
>Subject: Tea Leaves: Ephemeral Shared Entropy
>>* Reading the tea leaves. This ephemeral visual pattern contains a
>>signficant amount of entropy in a digitized, sharp black & white still.
>>The technique has value as a traditionally recognized, visceral,
>>face-to-face
>>"protocol", and is faster than lava lamps. :-) Alice and Bob swish the
>>leaves,
>>drain the tea, take the photo. They might hide the cup from others in the
>>room and provide a local light source. They then download the digitized
>>photograph to their laptops, digest down to the expected amount of true
>>entropy, encrypt using the previous shared data digest as a key (so that we
>>have a kind of "chaining mode" between "readings", and even between
>>>separate
>>.face-to-face meetings of Alice and Bob). Repeat the process with more
>>"readings" until the desired entropy is obtained. Wash out the last
>>pattern.
>>Drink tea.
On the subject of lava lamps, I decided to go to the lavarand page to
see
if they would have any complaints about this system (digitization of a
picture of a chaotic system) and found that I mis-remembered the
wording of the patent :-), and also they have added the following text
describing the effects of their patent --
<QUOTE SRC="http://lavarand.sgi.com/pat_trade.html">
Recently a few people had a cow over fears that our patent application
would impact the way they generate random numbers. Hopefully this
message will reduce the bovine output that has been needlessly generated
as a result of mis-interpretations on the patent application title.
Chances
are that you have nothing to fear.
Our patent application deals is a hardware patent application for
seeding
of pseudo-random number generators thru a very specific process. It
covers a specific method of generating a seed for a pseudo-random
number generator from 1 or more chaotic systems.
The hardware parent application does not cover the generation of random
sequences from chaotic sources. In particular things like the Linux
generator, RFC 1750 and recent Scientific American articles use/describe
different processes that are not covered under the scope of our hardware
patent application.
</QUOTE>
If everyone (but me :-) already knew they clarified the implications of
their patent, I apologize for the intrusion. Hopefully, it eased at
least
one person's fears, though!
~~ Patrick
>
