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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:14:56 ADT
Lewis McCarthy (lmccarth@cs.umass.edu)
Sat, 21 Feb 1998 02:40:05 -0500
Steve Salkin <salkin@pop.mindspring.com> writes:
> Can anyone give me a pointer to some information about the strengths
> of El Gamal versus other popular public key cryptosystems for a
> given modulus length?
ElGamal public keys are essentially the same as Diffie-Hellman public
keys. Thus the security requirements for, e.g., DH moduli apply also
to ElGamal moduli. The strength of the ElGamal schemes versus a direct
key recovery attack depends (at a minimum) upon the difficulty of
computing discrete logarithms in the group used.
For concrete discussion of strengths of moduli you might want to refer
to the specification of "The OAKLEY Key Determination Protocol",
<ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ipsec-oakley-02.txt>,
in particular Section 2.8 and Appendices A, D, and E.
-- Lewis http://www.cs.umass.edu/~lmccarth/ "In our opinion provable security is nothing more than a phantom, similar to the perpetuum mobile in thermodynamics." -- Joan Daemen, 1995
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:14:56 ADT