On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Horst von Brand wrote:
> Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolabs.com> said:
>
> [...]
>
> > (*) I don't know enough about the hash functions to know how to add a
> > few odd bytes into the store in a useful and safe way. We don't
> > really want to discard them either - think if a user-space random
> > daemon on an otherwise entropy-free system only writes one byte at
> > a time...
>
> I'm no expert either, but padding with anything (zeroes?) to get the right
> length should be safe, no?
No. A 4-byte accumulator is the right answer. We have to be careful here
though - the actual entropy might be in the partial words, we have to
account for it conservatively.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 31 2001 - 21:00:37 EST