[10378] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
RE: Welome to the Internet, here's your private key
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Guthery)
Mon Feb 4 16:20:33 2002
Message-ID: <177EEB93DEA5D4119B4800508BE753D2157F2E@FS1>
From: Scott Guthery <SGuthery@mobile-mind.com>
To: 'Bill Frantz' <frantz@pwpconsult.com>,
Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>, cryptography@wasabisystems.com
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 16:17:30 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
An 8-bit 1/2 MIP smart card can generate 1024 bit RSA key
pair in about 20 seconds and 512 bit key pair in less
than 5 seconds.
Since this isn't typically done in the checkout lane
this is certainly an acceptable time/security trade-off
by many lights. A device that can't generate a key pair
probably has other more compelling shortcomings as a
security token.
Cheers, Scott
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Frantz [mailto:frantz@pwpconsult.com]
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 3:42 PM
To: Bill Stewart; cryptography@wasabisystems.com
Subject: RE: Welome to the Internet, here's your private key
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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