A quick search found the reseller for Verisign for the Asia/Pacific region.
Their site describes their SSL certificates as 128bit and 40bit at
http://www.esign.com.au/server/. Worse still, they describe the 40bit
certificate as "standard".

(I do wonder why people just don't buy the cheaper Thawte certificates.
<envy> If they did, Mark Shuttleworth wouldn't be enjoying his trip to the
ISS </envy>).

The global cert costs about twice the standard cert. As for the law in
Australia on cryptography, this seems a reasonable page on International
encryption. http://rechten.kub.nl/koops/cryptolaw/

Finally, their support for servers mentions Apache-SSL with no mention at
all of openssl.

Without a little more information about which browsers are causing trouble,
there's not a lot more we can do.

- 
John Airey
Internet systems support officer, ITCSD, Royal National Institute of the
Blind,
Bakewell Road, Peterborough PE2 6XU,
Tel.: +44 (0) 1733 375299 Fax: +44 (0) 1733 370848 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 

The teaching of evolution as a proven fact rather than a theory has done
more harm to scientific progress than anything else in history.




-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Rescorla [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 26 April 2002 16:17
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Key strength confusion

[snip]
As far as I know, there is in fact no such thing as a 40-bit cert.

There are two kinds of certificates:

(1) Ordinary X.509 certs containing an RSA key of whatever strength
you've chosen.
(2) Certs containing the SGC/Step-Up extensions.

There are three kinds of browsers in the world:
(1) Really old export browsers which will only do 40 bit crypto.
(2) Newer export browsers which will do SGC/Step-Up.
(3) Old domestic browsers or new (post export-control removal)
export browsers which do strong crypto.

So, the interaction matrix between certificates and browsers looks like
this:

                                    Cert
Browser              Ordinary                     SGC/Step-Up
----------------------------------------------------------------
Old Export           40-bit crypto                40-bit crypto
Newer Export         40-bit crypto                SGC/Step-Up to strong
New Export/Domestic  Strong crypto                Strong crypto

There is no way to tag an X.509 certificate in such a way that
it is 40-bit only.




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