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Wednesday, November 15, 2006
One-Time Pad Generator: Version 1.2 Released
Fourmilab's one-time pad generator, which has been available on the Web as C source code since 1996 and as a JavaScript utility which runs within the user's browser since 1997, has been updated to version 1.2. The C source code has been converted to ANSI C and now compiles with GCC 4.1.1 at the “-Wall” level with no warnings. The ready-to-run Windows console application included with the source distribution is now a Win32 binary compiled with Microsoft C 7.0 (previously it was a 16-bit application built with Visual C 1.52). When generating a random seed on a Unix system, entropy from the /dev/random device file, if present, is stirred into the mix. The JavaScript generator page and the HTML documentation are now XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD compliant, and use Unicode entities for special characters such as left and right double quotes. This version is 100% compatible with all earlier releases in that if run with a fixed seed of a given value, identical output will be produced. This means that users who generate one-time pads from shared seeds need not ensure they're using the same version of the program. If you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and wonder why the XHTML validation buttons in the one-time pad generator documents don't do anything, that's the good old floating links bug which was reported against the 7RC1 release in these pages and to Microsoft on September 8th, 2006, and remains broken in the final production release of that putative browser.Posted at
17:42
