[10377] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
RE: Welome to the Internet, here's your private key
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Mon Feb 4 16:11:04 2002
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Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 12:41:43 -0800
To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>,
cryptography@wasabisystems.com
From: Bill Frantz <frantz@pwpconsult.com>
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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