- From: Bennet Yee <bsy@cs.ucsd.edu>
- Date: Mon, 05 Aug 1996 16:19:01 -0700
- To: Steve Petri <petri@litronic.com>
- cc: ietf-tls@w3.org
Steve, Yes, the MAC key is derived using assymetric cryptography. In pricinple, however, it does not matter how it is derived -- if it is a shared key that is only known to the sender and receiver, then the security of the MAC would still hold. I'm afraid, upon rereading your original message, that I may have answered a slightly different question than that which you had posed. It is true that if the key choice is not good, then eavesdroppers may use the traffic in an off-line dictionary attack to recover the key. I was addressing a different question, that of whether assymetric cryptography is required to perform such an authentication -- which is why I added at the end that users must chose passphrases with enough entropy. My apologies for misunderstanding your question. -bsy -------- Bennet S. Yee Phone: +1 619 534 4614 Email: bsy@cs.ucsd.edu Web: http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/bsy/ USPS: Dept of Comp Sci and Eng, 0114, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0114
Received on Monday, 5 August 1996 19:19:14 UTC