Thoughts on 15 day CJ crypto

Hal hfinney at shell.portal.com
Sat Dec 17 08:43:46 PST 1994


It is an interesting idea that the RSA actually helps with the RC4
decryption by letting them check a key guess.

This would suggest, though, that RC4 alone would not be allowed, only RC4
plus RSA.  If they allowed RC4 alone then unlimited-length RSA would not
seem any worse since with RC4 alone you don't get the key-checking
feature.

Also, are there restrictions on the encryption exponent?  A 1024 bit RSA
with a small encryption exponent would be faster to check than a 512 bit
RSA with an arbitrary 512 bit encryption exponent.  So if this were the
reason you might think they would put some restrictions on that.

Hal






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