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How do you verify, without being able to send a random challenge, that you are really talking to the radio telescope when it feeds you random data?

If you want to do TLS as a client you still need secure randomness. You need it as input to Diffie-Helman (or whatever key-agreement system you are using). Or, if you are dong old TSL with pure RSA, you need an unpredictable RSA key.

In any case, if an attacker can predict your randomness, he can pretend to be the radio telescope over TLS. The problem is inherent in all asymmetric crypto you would use. You could 'get around this' by using symmetric crypto, but then you need a shared secret, which does not scale.



Thanks for reminding me why I'm not a comedian. If you couldn't tell that anything in my comment was a joke, then I'm obviously not good at comedy.


It was obvious your suggestion was a joke. But there was a slightly surprising reason (besides the other obvious ones) that your joke-suggestion would be a bad idea. Hence it seemed interesting for the general discussion to explain this reason.




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