Proving that a choice was made in good faith

How can you prove that a choice was made in good faith? For example, if your company selects a cohort of people for random drug testing, how can you convince those who were chosen that they weren't chosen deliberately? Would a judge find your explanation persuasive? This is something I've helped companies with.

It may be impossible to prove that a choice was not deliberate, but you can show good faith by providing evidence that the choice was deliberate by a different criteria than the one in question.

I'll give four examples, three positive and one negative.

Cliff RNG

My previous three blog posts looked at different aspects of the Cliff random number generator. The generator needs a seed between 0 and 1 to start. Suppose I chose 0.8121086949937715 as my seed. On the one hand, that's a number with no apparent special features. But you might ask "Hey, why that number?" and you'd be right. I show in the first post in the series how that number was chosen to make the generator start off producing duplicate output.

In the next two posts in the series, I chose I - 3 as my seed. That's a recognizable number and obviously a deliberate choice. But it has no apparent connection to the random number generator, and so it's reasonable to assume that the seed wasn't chosen to make the generator look good or bad.

SHA-2

The SHA-2 cryptographic hash function seventy two 32-bit numbers for initial state that needed to be "random" in some sense. But if the values were actually chosen at random, critics would suspect that the values were chosen to provide a back door. And maybe there is a clever way to pick the initial state that provides a non-obvious exploitable weakness.

The designers of SHA-2 chose the square roots of the first consecutive primes to fill one set of constants, and the cube roots of the first consecutive primes to fill another. See code here.

The initial state is definitely not random. Someone looking at the state would eventually discover where it came from. So while the choice was obviously deliberate, but apparently not designed by any cryptographic criteria.

Curve 25519

Daniel Bernstein's elliptic curve Curve25519 is widely trusted in part because Bernstein made his design choices transparent. The curve is

y^2 = x^3 + 486662x^2 + x

over the finite field with 2²⁵⁵-19 elements, hence the name.

2²⁵⁵-19 is the largest prime less than 2²⁵⁵, and being close to 2²⁵⁵ makes the method efficient to implement. The coefficient 48666 is less obvious. But Bernstein explains in his paper that he took the three smallest possible values of this parameter that met the explicit design criteria, and then rejected two of them on objective grounds described at the bottom of the paper.

NIST P-384

The design of elliptic curve NIST P-384 is not as transparent as that of Curve25519 which has lead to speculation that NIST may have designed the curve to have a back door.

The curve has has Weierstrass form

y^2 = x^3 - 3x + b

over the finite field with p elements where

p = 2³⁸⁴ - 2¹²⁸ - 2⁹⁶ + 2³² - 1.

As with Curve25519, the choice of field size was motivated by efficiency; the pattern of powers of 2 enables some tricks for efficient implementation. Also, there are objective reasons why the linear coefficient is -3. But the last coefficient b is the 383-bit number

27580193559959705877849011840389048093056905856361568521428707301988689241309860865136260764883745107765439761230575

which has raised some eyebrows. NIST says the value was chosen at random, though not directly. More specifically, NIST says it first generated a certain 160-bit random number, then applied a common key stretching algorithm to obtain b above. Researchers are divided over whether they believe this. See more in this post.

Conclusion

Sometimes you can't prove that a choice wasn't deliberate. In that case the best you can do is show that the choice was deliberate, but by an innocent criteria, one unrelated to the matter at hand.

I tried to do this in the Cliff RNG blog posts by using I as my seed. I couldn't actually use I because the seed had to be between 0 and 1, but there's an obvious way to take I and produce a number between 0 and 1.

The designers of SHA-2 took a similar route. Just as I is a natural choice for a real number, primes are natural choices for integers. They couldn't use integers directly, but they made complicated patterns from simple integers in a natural way by taking roots.

Daniel Bernstein gained the cryptography community's trust by making his design criteria transparent. Given his criteria, the design was almost inevitable.

NIST was not as persuasive as Daniel Bernstein. They claim to have chosen a 160-bit number at random, and they may very well have. But there's no way to know whether they generated a lot of 160-bit seeds until they found one that resulted in a constant term that has some special property. They may have chosen their seed in good faith, but they have a not been completely persuasive.

Sometimes it's not enough to act in good faith; you have to make a persuasive case that you acted in good faith.