To check an OpenPGP fingerprint for correctness, it is sufficient (for practical purposes) to compare the leading and trailing eight hexadecimal digits, and perhaps a few digits in the middle.
This is not true for raw RSA keys because weak keys are in close Hamming distance to any given reference key (I think, I haven't verified this). So you'd need to compare the full (n, e) pair, bit by bit, or compare a cryptographically strong digest of them (the OpenPGP approach, more or less). ECC public keys are small, and a digest will not provide much of a length reduction. But I wonder if the digest would still make sense to perturb the bits, so that it is not possible to create a near-collision. Do ECC public keys behave like RSA keys in this regard? Does this depend on the chosen encoding format? _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
