Re: Diffie Hellman

Merlin,

I raised this question before
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-encryption/2002Jan/0019.html).

I suggest to use X9.42 for Diffie-Hellman public keys for two reasons:

1. The X9.42 variant of  the Diffie-Hellman key is what used in PKIX X509
certificate.

2. From security point of view, PKC#3 is outdated. The security of  the Discrete
Logarithm
problem underlying Diffie-Hellman relies not only on the size of  the prime p and
the size
of  the subgroup generated by the "generator" g in GF(p), but also on the size of
the maximal
prime factor of  the order of this subgroup, because of the Pohlig-Hellman
algorithm.
The appearance of the prime number q in X9.42 serves such purpose.

Jiandong

merlin wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The Diffie Hellman part of the spec is somewhat ambiguous at the moment:
>
> . It is not clear whether PKCS#3 or X.942 should be used. The reference
>   suggests the latter; the public key encoding suggests the former.
>
> . Keying material generation is somewhat ambiguous; the examples suggest
>   algorithm first, the language suggests ZZ first; the examples suggest
>   the counter is one byte, the language suggests two hexadecimal digits.
>
> Any guidance so we can nail down DH interop?
>
> Thanks, Merlin
>
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Received on Friday, 15 February 2002 17:20:01 UTC