Re: [Eligibility-discuss] On 3797 alternatives

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

Hi Rich,

I think perhaps we are talking past each other.

I'm just using the example of known seeds as an intuition pump. The attack
I'm actually concerned
about is one in which the attacker takes the known list and precomputes all
possible seeds and then
determines which input list has the highest probability of a favorable
nomcom and then does strategic
withdrawals to produce that list.

-Ekr

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 11:12 AM Salz, Rich <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
>
> The attack I have in mind is that you have a pool of (say) 10
> nomcom-qualified people.
>
> They all volunteer at the beginning and so are on the list. Then once the
> rest of the list
>
> is set, you run the numbers and find the optimal set of people to withdraw
> to get the
>
> most favorable distributional outcome for the selection process.
>
>
>
> It should be obvious that this is worthwhile if the randomness is known in
> advance: you
>
> get to choose between 1024 different nomcoms. I haven't run the numbers
> and so am
>
> not really sure how many bits of randomness you need to make this attack
> ineffective
>
> with a pool of attackers of size N [0]
>
>
>
> I think in general, the delay between the seeds being known, and the
> choices being made, is a day or two. Is that enough time to mount the
> attack? Without being known? I’m skeptical. But perhaps someone else will
> be nerd-sniped into determining the number of bits needed to make it
> ineffective.
>
>
>