Re: DSA alternative to RSA

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William H. Geiger III (whgiii@openpgp.net)
Mon, 27 Jul 1998 20:56:35 -0500

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In <006e01bdb9bd$728c5980$In <006e01bdb9bd$728c5980$84004bca@home>, on 07/27/98
   at 06:59 PM, "Enzo Michelangeli" <em@who.net> said:

>You may have a look at the classics: e.g., Applied Cryptography. DSA has
>been long suspected of harbouring backdoors, having been designed by NSA,

Yeh and the same group has been suspecting that there are back doors in
DES for the same reasons and no one has yet to find one after all these
years.

>and also for technical reasons (for example, it allows unscrupulous
>implementors to leak pieces of keys or plaintext, due to the availability
>of a fat subliminal channel).

>Also, DSA (or, better, the present DSS) is limited to 1024-bit
>keys.

This is due to the limit of a 160bit hash. There is no added security of
increasing the DSA key size without also increasing the corresponding hash
size (weakest link and all that).

One can also do ElGamal signatures but there are some implementation nits
that must be taken into account:

"Generating ElGamal signatures without knowing the secret key", Advances
in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT '96 (corrected version), LNCS vol. 1070,
Springer Verlag, pages: 10-18, 1996.

http://www.bell-labs.com/user/bleichen/bib.html

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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:56 ADT