Network Working Group D. Eastlake 3rd
Request for Comments: 3797 Motorola Laboratories
Obsoletes: 2777 June 2004
Category: Informational
Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee (NomCom) Random Selection
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).
Abstract
This document describes a method for making random selections in such
a way that the unbiased nature of the choice is publicly verifiable.
As an example, the selection of the voting members of the IETF
Nominations Committee (NomCom) from the pool of eligible volunteers
is used. Similar techniques would be applicable to other cases.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. General Flow of a Publicly Verifiable Process . . . . . . . . . 2
2.1. Determination of the Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2.2. Publication of the Algorithm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.3. Publication of Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Randomness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1. Sources of Randomness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.2. Skew. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.3. Entropy Needed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. A Suggested Precise Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Handling Real World Problems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.1. Uncertainty as to the Pool. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2. Randomness Ambiguities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Fully Worked Example. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. Reference Code. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Appendix A: History of NomCom Member Selection . . . . . . . . . . 16
Appendix B: Changes from RFC 2777. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Eastlake 3rd Informational