[E-Lang] New Page: Partially Ordered Message Delivery

[Mark S. Miller]

At 09:10 AM Monday 3/5/01, Ben Laurie wrote:
>Tyler Close wrote:
>> I think E's archash technique is actually more flexible than this. In
>> an E message send, the sender gets to specify the address that the
>> return value will be placed at. The sender does this by providing a
>> nonce (the archash) that will be transformed by the receiver with a
>> one-way-hash (SHA1), to calculate the return value address.
>
>Hmm! How is this calculation done?

The archash is a randomly chosen unguessable number.  Or actually, 
pseudo-randomly chosen from an entropy pool into which we're constantly 
tossing new alleged entropy whenever we find some (Entropy mechanism thanks 
to Bill).  The "address" (as in SwissNumber) is simply the SHA1 hash of this 
unguessable number.

I called it "archash" as an abuse of trig terminology.  

    X == archash(address)  iff  hash(X) == address


        Cheers,
        --MarkM