Random Numbers in Perl

[Jason]

Kevin Buettner wrote:
> The other thing to think about in your client/server application is
> the communication of your entropy data from the client to the server.
> If you expose this data in any way (such as sending it in the clear
> from the client to the server), you've compromised the randomness of
> the numbers that you wish to later generate since an attacker who has
> this entropy data will then be able to use this data to predict the
> numbers that you're generating.  (I think it's probably a mistake to
> try to collect entropy from the clients; if you do, you'll need to be
> absolutely certain that this entropy is sent securely from client to
> server.)

Consider, however, if the code is to function in a manner similar to
PGP... there is no need to protect the public key from interception -
only a need to ensure that the private key is not readable. As such,
having the client generate the randomness is in fact the ideal
solution - and what is needed is not encryption of the public key
(silly), but rather, a challenge/responce verification scheme to
ensure that the public key arrives at the server without having been
tampered with in any form.

-- 
jkenner @ mindspring . com__
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