Andreas,

Thank you for your support.  As for the entropy collector. I'll take as many
as you have, do you have 31 more?  I've been considering writing Schneier's
Fortuna for our PRNG.  

Ron

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-
> bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Raab
> Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 3:26 PM
> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> Subject: Re: Cryptographic Primitives
> 
> tim Rowledge wrote:
> >
> > On 5-Oct-06, at 9:05 AM, Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
> >
> >> Thanks Tim the process sounds fine but before we go to the effort I
> would
> >> like to know if there is a consensus that this is a good thing to do.
> >
> > Well that's definitely not for me to decide; I think it's perfectly
> > sensible to make them available within the VMMaker world and that would
> > leave it up to you (as in all you out there) to discuss the rest.
> 
> I'm +1 on the idea. The crypto prims are algorithms that are typically
> chosen to execute in 32bit and we pay a heavy price running them inside
> Squeak. Having primitified some myself (MD5 and RC4 in Croquet to be
> precise) speedups of a 100x are typical (which I have previously only
> seen for floating point code, not for integer heavy code). In addition,
> crypto prims are tiny bits of inner loops - I'd be extremely surprised
> if the difference in compiled VM code is anywhere near 50k or so.
> 
> Given the tradeoffs and the importance for Crypto in many application
> domains, it seems like a good choice to include these primitives directly.
> 
> BTW, while we're at it: In Croquet, I've added a primitive to gather
> entropy from the OS for seeding crypto RNGs securely; if the current
> Crypto prims don't include that I would heavily lobby for including it -
>   while it's not difficult to write platform specific versions, having a
> common abstraction over the vastly different means (a file on Unix, and
> API call on Windows) is definitely helpful.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
>    - Andreas
>