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Re: Plausible deniability (a feature to think about)

2005-10-03 20:04:05

Jon Callas <jon(_at_)callas(_dot_)org> writes:

There's nothing wrong with X9.42 technical. Its non-use (and DSA's) are all
layer 8 and 9 issues.

Actually X9.42 is a pretty awkward way to do key exchange.  You can use
Elgamal as a drop-in replacement for RSA, but X9.42 requires both sender and
receiver certs to establish a key, and mixes in a large pile of other (largely
unnecessary) complexity and extra parameters and data values for no good
reason.  It seems to have been heavily influenced by the Fortezza KEA
mechanism.  It's just a royal pain to implement no matter how you look at it.

While I'm commenting on this, there isn't much problem with key formats, X9.42
and DSA are both from the DLP family so they use the same key generation and
format.  Well, almost, the X9.42 guys copied the DSA spec wrong and reversed
two of the parameters, but apart from that they're identical.

Peter.

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