Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ur-whale 356 days ago
The claim "This makes the cipher aperiodic" should be justified.

As an immediate counter, I would say that if your code runs on a physically finite machine (an however large, yet finite number of bits to store state), this strikes me as very unlikely to be theoretically true.

1 comments

You are correct from a formal perspective. Any finite state machine is periodic.

In cryptography, "aperiodic" means the period is computationally unreachable. We use a 256-bit state, making the probability of a collision negligible (on the order of 2^256). This is a parameter of the CVM; it could be increased to 512 bits or more if required.

This is the standard security model for all modern hash-based constructions.