On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 02:16:10PM -0500, Whyte, William wrote: > > > On 12/14/05, Peter Gutmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I don't know if there's any site tracking this, but (as the > > tutorial says) you > > > can either go with PKCS #1 (the de facto standard, easy to > > implement and > > > widely used) ... > >
Someone not Peter wrote: > > Actually, I'm embarassed to admit this but I've seen PKCS before but > > never with enough context to know what it was; I thought it was some > > kind of RSA proprietary mumbo-jumbo. But, oh dear, it involves ASN.1. > > That rules out use by the layperson. I've run into ASN.1 before with > > regard to SNMP, and it struck me as infinitely more complex than > > anything I'd ever need to query packet counts on my router. > > Have a look at PKCS#1. There's hardly any ASN.1 in it at all and > the structures are relatively simple. There's also a PKCS examples > document that talks you through it. An application programmer who is using PKCS1 doesn't even need to know the small amount of ASN.1 in the spec... libraries that implement RSA PKCS1 take care of the ASN.1 for the programmer. There's no need for the consumer of a crypto API to look into the bigints that make up an RSA key. Even if you did for some reason, many APIs I have used don't represent RSA keys at the API level with the ASN.1, they use their own bigint format. The part you need to look at is the padding, and even for that you will be using some library's padding routines, not writing your own. Eric --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
