Subject: Re: [Gen-art] Review: draft-ietf-secsh-newmodes-05.txt

From: "Michael A. Patton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 12:23:12 -0400 (EDT)

From: Avri Doria <[email-masked]>
   Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 14:50:24 +0200

   2. i assume the birthday property (3.2) is well know.  For the naive reader
      it might be good to have a reference to where this is explained.

When I saw this comment in your review, I felt inspired to try taking
a look at it.  I'm not a security person, but did happen to recognize
the phrase "birthday property" as referring to something covered in my
first (and only) statistics course (which was, I think, at the time,
required for a CS degree).  Given that, it's probably covered in most
introductory statistics texts, which may make it hard to give one good
reference.

Given my understanding of the statistics usage, I can work out what
the first short paragraph of 3.2 is probably saying.  But, until I saw
this I hadn't realized that the "birthday property" of standard
statistics would apply to block ciphers, but after I saw it mentioned,
a few minutes of thought reveals that it's reasonable that it should.
However, I don't think it's proper for this document to require
readers to rederive this, even if they understand the "birthday
property" to begin with.  So I think that rather than a reference just
to explain the "birthday property", a reference to a good paper on why
it applies to block ciphers might be in line.

However, since this is then used as the basis for some statistics math
in the following paragraph, I think that the understandability and
readability would be improved with a little extra expansion of
the short paragraph in addition to a good expernal reference for all
the details.

	-MAP

_______________________________________________
Gen-art mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/gen-art