From: Jake <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
crypto> I understand the behavior and I am wondering about its
crypto> implications, e.g. someone stores their encryption key that
crypto> started with "0x00" to disk in hex, and future key loading
crypto> would shift all the bytes of the key forward.... you get the
crypto> picture. Jake
You're suggesting that a key component (like the bignums that a RSA
key is composed of) would start with one or more zeroes. However, if
you think of it as numbers, just as, say, 0x00123456, you can see that
the leading zeroes are useless anyway. Also, if that would happen in
a key component like p or n, I'd be really worried, since my 1024 bit
key might be reduced to have an effective length of, say, 879 bits.
It's easy to forget, but a number is not a specific sequence of bytes,
it's just a number. It is stored as a sequence of bytes, but can at
any time be subject to normalization, for mathematical and technical
reasons.
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