[109653] in Cypherpunks
Re: P1363: Biprime Cryptography to replace RSA?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bodo Moeller)
Wed Mar 31 18:18:25 1999
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 99 09:46 +0100
From: Bodo_Moeller@public.uni-hamburg.de (Bodo Moeller)
To: stds-p1363@majordomo.ieee.org
Cc: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>, cypherpunks@toad.com, jya@pipeline.com
In-Reply-To: <v03130300b326854428c8@[24.128.119.92]>
Reply-To: Bodo_Moeller@public.uni-hamburg.de (Bodo Moeller)
"Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>:
[...]
> I would propose "Biprime Cryptography" or "BPC" as the generic term for
> RSA. Biprime is a natural and appropriate English name for the product of
> two primes.
Isn't that term _too_ generic? P1363 already uses the term Integer
Factorization to refer to the class of cryptosystems that RSA is in,
and RSA isn't the only "biprime" one. (Also, no-one except the
key-owner is concerned whether RSA is used with a bi-prime, tri-prime
... key. While such keys may not be covered by the P1363
specification, it does not make too much sense to name the algorithm
after a characteristic of the keys that encrypting users cannot
verify.)
But note that RSA with e = n was already described in the recently
published 1973 paper "A Note on 'Non-Secret Encryption'" by C C Cocks,
which builds on the 1970 paper "The Possibility of Secure Non-Secret
Encryption" by J H Ellis. Unfortunately the initials "EC" are quite
misleading, "ECRSA" might also be misleading and/or too close to the
alleged trademark. Using the various possibilites with alphabetically
sorted letters leads to the variations "CE", "ARS", and "ACERS".
> Biprime Cryptography sounds distinctive and is somewhat
> self-explanitory.
But it could also mean Rabin (much more than RSA, because with Rabin's
algorithm, the exponent is implicit).
