[81505] in Cypherpunks
Re: PGP Key generation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Bradley)
Mon Jun 9 20:44:40 1997
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 19:50:14 +0000 ( )
From: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
To: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, "Robert A. Costner" <pooh@efga.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.970608211659.3887A-100000@purple.voicenet.com>
Reply-To: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
> There are a few shortcuts you could take. For instance, instead of finding
> two random, prime numbers for every key, just keep one prime constant and
> generate another random prime for each key. This has the disadvantage
> that any one key factored would allow the other keys to be factored
> trivially. I know there are other ways, but I'm not very good with number
> theory.
This would actually not save as much time as it trivially appears to, the
main time eater in pgp key generation is a. getting random seeds and
mixing to distill randomness, and b. executing the extended euclidean
algorithm to find modular inverses.
Does anyone know any other speedups? - I`m sure I could think of a few
but I`m really not in the mood ;-)...
Datacomms Technologies data security
Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org
Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
"Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"
