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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Truly Random Numbers On A Quantum Computer??
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2025 04:58:15 -0000 (UTC)
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On Sat, 29 Mar 2025 20:25:23 -0300, Ethan Carter wrote:

> There's also an interesting paper by Anna Johnston on entropy, in which
> she makes the (correct, in my opinion) remark that entropy really is a
> relative notion.

That makes sense. I’ve long thought that one’s estimates of the 
probabilities of various events depends very much on one’s point of view.

I think Bayes’ Theorem says as much.

> I get the feeling here that, by the same token, you could never have a
> provably secure cryptosystem because someone knows the private key?

None of our cryptosystems are provably secure. RSA depends on the assumed 
difficulty of two problems: factorizing large integers, and computing 
discrete logarithms, and would break if either one was solved. There is no 
proof that either of these problems is actually hard: we simply don’t know 
of any good algorithms for them, after decades, even centuries of looking.