Chuck Pareto wrote:
> I'm not sure what you mean by "shouldn't be using public-key > encryption", why? Because you don't understand its properties, so there's no way you can know whether or not it meets your security requirements. > It seems like .Net sets up a nice class that is easily > implemented, all I need is the key and the exponent and I can > encrypt and decrypt when needed. Right, except you don't get any security. > I don't think I really have a choice about what to use, I recently > started in a group that has a public and private key they are using > to encrypt and then decrypt strings of data. Which is fine if, for example, those strings of data are randomly-chosen keys for a symmetric cipher. It is, however, not fine if those strings are messages. > I don't think I can change that. What would be the advantages of doing > what you suggest and using symmetric encryption to encrypt and PK > encryption for encrypting the key? The advantage would be that if you have reasonable security objectives, there's a good chance the algorithm would meet them. Numerous attacks against RSA are known -- RSA is just an algorithm, it is not a scheme -- and you need a well-designed cryptographic scheme to meet actual security requirements. http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/abstracts/RSAattack-survey.html > I don't think we have a symmetric key because we are using RSA with > a public and private key. That's a non-sequiter. The public and private key could be being used to encipher and decipher the symmetric key. This is the normal approach. > If you think your approach is better please let me know and I will > discuss it with my group and see if we can make a change. If your group includes a security expert, this kind of stuff would already be done. If it doesn't, the likelihood of this making things any better isn't really all that great. DS ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager majord...@openssl.org
