Welome to the Internet, here's your private key

[Bill Frantz]

At 10:20 AM -0800 2/4/02, Bill Stewart wrote:
>There are special cases where the user's machine doesn't have
>the CPU horsepower to generate a key - PCs are fine,
>but perhaps Palm Pilots and similar handhelds are too slow
>(though a typical slow 33MHz 68000 or Dragonball is faster
>than the 8086/80286 MSDOS machines that PGP originally ran on.)
>Cash machines may be too slow, but they normally run symmetric crypto.
>A smartcard-only system probably _is_ too limited to generate keys,
>but that's the only realistic case I see.

It may depend on the public key system you are using.  Where you have to
search for numbers which have certain mathematical properties (like with
RSA), then you can indeed use a bunch of CPU.  For systems like DSA, where
the private key is in essence a random number, there is not searching, and
key generation is a lot faster.

Cheers - Bill


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Bill Frantz           | The principal effect of| Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506         | DMCA/SDMI is to prevent| 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz at pwpconsult.com | fair use.              | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA



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