[104785] in Cypherpunks
Re: Using a password as a private key.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=)
Wed Oct 28 18:58:50 1998
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 98 23:08 +0100
From: ulf@fitug.de (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=)
To: redrook@yahoo.com
In-Reply-To: <19981027215307.3786.rocketmail@send1d.yahoomail.com>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: ulf@fitug.de (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=)
>‚‚‚‚Assymetic crypto systems such as
>Diffie-Hellman, El-Gamel, and DSS, allow the private key to be a
>randomly chosen number. ‚But, as a cute hack, instead of using a
>random number, for the private key, you could use a hash of the User
>Name, and a password.
That has been proposed in the context of elliptic curve cryptography
where the keys don't need much entropy. I think George Barwood's
pegwit works that way.
I don't like the idea though. You're giving everybody the chance to
run a password guessing attack on your secret key.
