Re: PGP scripting...

From: Crispin Cowan (crispin@wirex.com)
Date: 01/11/03

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    Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 00:56:35 -0800
From: Crispin Cowan <crispin@wirex.com>
To: jasonc@science.org

    Jason Coombs wrote:

    >In addition to being confused about arbitrary asymmetry in RSA cryptography
    >and whether or not e and n were reversibly derived from d such that
    >possession of d was the same as possession of e and n, I was making a
    >practical assertion that many RSA implementations aren't coded in such a way
    >as to facilitate arbitrary designation of which key is public and which
    >private.
    >...
    >Anyone know why? Is this a known performance differential with RSA or is
    >Microsoft doing something strange?
    >
    While it is mathematically satisfying that public and private keys are
    symmetric, as a practical matter you want to be really, *really* careful
    to always publis the one key (public), and never, *ever* publish the
    other key (private). "Oopsing" and publishing the wrong one by mistake
    would be disasterous.

    This makes it rather convenient that the software won't readily allow
    you to accidentally publish your private key.

    Crispin 

    -- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX                      http://wirex.com/~crispin/
Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
			    Just say ".Nyet"