Re: revamped sigs web pages

Faried Nawaz writes:
> How did you select that value for constant c (http://cr.yp.to/sigs/key.html)?

It's a number chosen randomly between 2^1072 and 2^1072+2^1066. The two
things that could be done better are (1) producing publicly verifiable
evidence that the number was chosen randomly and (2) using a marginally
different distribution to match the distribution of possible pq/2^464.
Change #2 guarantees that the security is the same as for uncompressed
keys, and change #1 will let everyone verify the guarantee.

It would be astonishing if #2 were necessary, and it would also be
astonishing if building c from the digits of pi in reverse order were
unsafe, but I might as well use a provably safe method.

> Where's the software that generates the document id?

Basically, head /dev/urandom | md5. The point is to have a reference
mechanism that lasts even if the URL doesn't; search engines can find
the string ``Permanent ID of this document: ...'' inside the document.
This assumes a cooperative Internet, of course.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago