At 10:20 AM -0800 2/4/02, Bill Stewart wrote: >There are special cases where the user's machine doesn't have >the CPU horsepower to generate a key - PCs are fine, >but perhaps Palm Pilots and similar handhelds are too slow >(though a typical slow 33MHz 68000 or Dragonball is faster >than the 8086/80286 MSDOS machines that PGP originally ran on.) >Cash machines may be too slow, but they normally run symmetric crypto. >A smartcard-only system probably _is_ too limited to generate keys, >but that's the only realistic case I see.
It may depend on the public key system you are using. Where you have to search for numbers which have certain mathematical properties (like with RSA), then you can indeed use a bunch of CPU. For systems like DSA, where the private key is in essence a random number, there is not searching, and key generation is a lot faster. Cheers - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The principal effect of| Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | DMCA/SDMI is to prevent| 16345 Englewood Ave. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | fair use. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]