[Cryptography Team] package structure

[luciano]

Hi Chris and all,
I think I agree with Ron, perhaps we should take SecureRandom (and
RandomPool) out of the base. About collecting randomness, do you think
we need SecureRandom class>>#entropicSourcesDo:? Shouldn't we use a
RandomPool?

Luciano


On 2/13/06, Chris Muller <chris at funkyobjects.org> wrote:
> I know we've talked about our package structure before
> but..
>
> As I work through this book, I have some fixes and
> additions to our Crytography packages.  Here is a list
> of things I plan to post in the coming days:
>
>   - addition of entropic sources for seed material
>   - addition of the CTR (counter) cipher mode
>   - addition of the "Fortuna" random generator
>   - fix for seriously broken MillerRabin algorithm
> preventing generation of proper-sized asymmetric keys
> (i.e., for Diffie-Hellman / ElGamal and maybe RSA
> too).
>
> For the first one "entropic sources for seed
> material".  It individually hashes unpredictable
> strings from the users environment such as:
>
>   - current directory
>   - Time millisecondClockValue
>   - World imageForm bits compressToByteArray
>   - SmalltalkImage current vmStatisticsReportString
>   - Sensor mousePoint
>   - etc., etc.
>
> and then finally SHA256 hashes the concatentation of
> all of those hashes.  Slow, but totally unpredictable.
>
> I've started by implementing SecureRandom
> class>>#entropicSourcesDo: which is used by
> SecureRandom class>>#randomSeed.  But SecureRandom is
> in the "CryptographyBase" package, so I can't use SHA1
> and SHA256.
>
> It seems to me that many crypto primitives are built
> from other ones.  Wouldn't it be easier to have
> everything back in one package?  What are we trying to
> accomplish here by having them all in separate
> packages?
>
> How should I proceed?
>
> Thanks,
>   Chris