🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <163@iris.randvax.UUCP> jim@iris.UUCP (Jim Gillogly) writes:
...
>The security of an RSA scheme also depends on how the "secret" primes were
>selected.  The company supplying RSA encryption would certainly offer a
>way to select primes, since most people won't be able to do it themselves.
>For example, they might say "type a password that you select totally at
>random, such as your wife's first name or your favorite rock group" and
>then replicate that totally random password to get two different 100-digit
>odd numbers.  From there count by twos, testing each number for primality
>(easy), and stop when you have your two totally secret 100-digit primes.

Scheme:
    Step 1 - have customer hit space bar N times (to get an N bit number).
	     The output will be an N bit binary number which consists
	     of the least significant bit of the microsecond clock at
	     each space bar detection.  If the leading bit is 0 complement
	     the whole number (we are looking for an N bit number, so
	     the leading bit must be one).

    Step 2 - go forward from this initial seed number until you find a
	     prime that you find satisfactory (ie. the factors of (p-1)
	     meet certain criteria, etc.).

    Repeat steps 1 and 2 for second prime.

This doesn't seem to provide much foothold for the codebreakers to
use.  Maybe factoring would be easier than trying to reconstruct the
generation sequence used.