The Side Channel

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3:43 AM

@MaartenBodewes I don't think that's true. In information theory, you can have fractions of a bit. In that case, it's measuring a probability.

Er, in physics, I mean. In information theory, a fractional bit is a measure of information that doesn't fit into an even number of bits. Sure, 7-bit ASCII encodes 7 bits for a single character, but if you're truly encoding only alphanumeric characters, you don't need 7 bits. You need log2(26*2+10) bits.

It's just that, in computers, you can't really have a fraction of a bit, so you round it up.

So I would say that a bit is absolutely not the smallest quantum of information.

4 hours later…

Maarten Bodewes

7:52 AM

@forest No, a computer bit is something that cannot be divided as singular piece of information. How we calculate things is something different, math is a human invention after all, we can do what it what we want. I'm about to deliver -4 grapes to the supermarket, for instance.

3 hours later…

forest

11:16 AM

The term "bit" in computing came from the term in information theory.

5 hours later…

Crypto HNQ

4:25 PM

Q: Static Diffie-Hellman in TLS

Static Diffie-Hellman (cipher suites with DH in their name but neither DHE or DH_anon - requires that the server owns a certificate with a DH public key in it. When static DH key exchange is used, the server provides a certificate containing fixed Diffie-Hellman parameters signed by the certific...

4 hours later…

Crypto HNQ

8:08 PM

Q: Verifiable delay functions vs Proof of Sequential Work

I've read recent papers about verifiable delay functions (Boneh et al 2018) and proof of sequential works (Cohen et al. 2018). I understand that the core difference between the definitions is that a VDF output is required to be unique (while in PoSW constructions - many commitments can prove know...