Whats the best language for this?
3 22 May 2015 18:57 by u/Diogenes_The_Cynic
I want to make a one-time pad password generator but I'm a novice programmer.
I figure that using an irrational number (for example 1573/2567) would be great for this application because it'll go on forever and never repeat itself, so as long as the numbers that create the irrational number are not known, the password would be long, and not guessable.
13 comments
2 u/Daelphinux 23 May 2015 00:19
What you should be looking up to use to generate really intense passwords are the Mersenne Primes. They're used in crypographic algorithms to make some pretty intense calculations. What you should do is look into cryptography and the use of extra-large Mersenne Primes.
Ultimately though, any language could generate one-time pads, but it's not a task I'd suggest to a novice without studying cryptography first.
1 u/frame11 22 May 2015 19:05
One thing I find to make a language "best" is the guidance available for learning to do something new.
Did you know there is a book One-Time Pad Programming in C++ for Secret Communications?
Don't feed amazon. PM me if you're interested.
1 u/PythonIsFun 25 May 2015 02:30
Just to ask, what do you have against Amazon?
0 u/frame11 25 May 2015 02:42
I'm not "anti-amazon", but they do certainly enable some shitty publishing practices.
0 u/PythonIsFun 25 May 2015 02:43
...again, since I was asking for a more specific answer: "Shitty publishing practices" how?
0 u/frame11 25 May 2015 03:01
Amazon Digital Services electronically publishes a lot of low quality content for third parties, a fair amount of it automatically generated, and a lot of it deceptively advertized.
The book I linked to on the OTP is not low-quality, but it's also not really a book as the average consumer would think of one. The "look inside" reads like the intro to any other programing tutorial book: "Here's what we'll be doing in this book." The book itself has no real additional discussion and is just 8 pages or so of code.
0 u/PythonIsFun 25 May 2015 03:11
So wait, it's literally code examples you can find on the internet? That seems dumb.
I mean, it's ALWAYS a good skill to be able to learn from just code.
0 u/j_ 26 May 2015 15:06
It’s not so much that the book is poorly written. It’s not written at all.
This guy caused some controversy in 2008, but at least he has the excuse of being a professor working on “artificial intelligence”. This AI supposedly writes proper books on specific topics. He has generated “over 200,000” books and at least 85,000 have been listed for sale on Amazon at some point.
Then there are some absurd ones that don’t even try to disguise themselves as real books, like this. Just random web content compiled into an ebook.
These are all third-parties, but Amazon’s relatively open marketplace is what enables them to sell this crap.
0 u/PythonIsFun 26 May 2015 15:32
That's crazy. One thing is if your bot can actually write, the other is if it just takes random stuff and stuffs it in a book.
0 u/dchem 23 May 2015 07:41
I'd recommend looking into something like Rule 30 cellular automata. Coding this should be super easy in any language. Python would be a good start, as it's easy to pick up. Though it would still be called pseudo-random generator.