On a technical note, how long does DSS take to compute. I'm using
RSA at the moment - not the best for speed. Its tolerable on my machines
but then again the slowest thing I use is 120 Spec marks. Is DSS fast?
In my experience, speed isn't better with DSS over RSA. Our implementations
of DSA and RSA (which are using the same routines for long integer arithmetic
operations) need the following time (in seconds) on a Sparc10 for signing
and verifying a 100 kByte string, using 1024 bit keys:
dsaWithSHA OID { 1 3 14 3 2 13 } NULL parameter
Sign (1024 bits): 0.466 (total), 0.431 (DSA), 0.034 (SHA)
Veri (1024 bits): 0.984 (total), 0.952 (DSA), 0.031 (SHA)
md5WithRsaEncryption OID { 1 2 840 113549 1 1 4 } NULL parameter
Sign (1024 bits): 0.918 (total), 0.890 (RSA), 0.028 (MD5)
Veri (1024 bits): 0.068 (total), 0.039 (RSA), 0.027 (MD5)
You see in the middle column the time needed for the RSA resp. DSA operation.
Signing with DSA needs about half the time of that with RSA, but verifying
is nearly 30 times faster with RSA. This relation is pretty the same in all
our time measurement with various keysizes.
Wolfgang