[43843] in Cypherpunks
Re: Design proposal: crypto-capable generic interface
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tatu Ylonen)
Thu Nov 23 09:36:07 1995
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 1995 14:34:26 +0100
From: Tatu Ylonen <ylo@cs.hut.fi>
To: raph@c2.org
Cc: cme@tis.com, cypherpunks@toad.com, cme@tis.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951122094209.29001A-100000@infinity.c2.org>
(raph@c2.org)
> Ok. But public keys have one serious disadvantage: their size. I can't
> put a public key on my business card or read it over the phone. I want a
> unforgeable key name. I want this to be the standard key name in the
> interface between the application and the crypto engine. I want users to
> be able to specify them directly, at the very least to bootstrap the
> public key infrastructure.
There is a patent by someone (I think it was IBM) on how to pack RSA
keys in small space. I think they were putting them on the magnetic
strips that you have behind every card. I'm afraid I don't have the
patent number saved, but I have seen the patent document myself at the
patent office. No, I'm afraid I don't remember how they encoded it.
Using that method (or something similar), you could probably encode
the keys into acceptably short strings with S/KEY-style encoding.
Tatu
