STT - useable in real life ?

[Hal]

lyalc at ozemail.com.au (lyal collins) writes:

>From reading the STT specs, a 'credential' is made up of typically 4
>certificates - root, country CA, issuer Ca, and cardholder/merchant.
>Two certificates are based upon a 1024 bit public keys, 1 (root) is 2048
>while the cardholder PK is 512/768 bit.
>I believe a decrypt operation is required to verify each certificate.

Usually, decrypt operations are needed to ISSUE certificates but not to
verify them.  Verification is equivalent to an encrypt operation using a
small exponent, and may be roughly about 100 times faster than a decrypt.

Hal