C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:26:59 -0400

I just generated an ssh key and saw this:

+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
| o =             |
|+ X E   S        |
|.* B o .         |
|  + * o          |
|  .o *           |
| ..oo.+          |
+-----------------+

This page - http://alibash.livejournal.com/200301.html - gave a link
to this paper -
http://sparrow.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/projects/validation/validation.pdf
- but while that's interesting (it goes into quite some detail about
random art, and the need for structure), it doesn't appear to explain
exactly the algorithm used for the image above.

The nearest I can find to an explanation is the quoted block of text
on this page - http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080615022750

It's a nice idea, but a bit odd that something that could be so
important is so poorly documented.  I assume that a lot of the
necessary crypto properties can be derived directly from the fact that
it's generated from the hash (so it must be hard to generate
collisiions?).  But that must also depend to some extent on the image
generation algorithm (for example, how much of the possible image
space can be used?)

Andrew