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