On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 11:23:53AM -0600, William H. Geiger III wrote:
>
> from http://www.digicash.com/Company/
>
>
> "eCash software uses digital signature technology based on
> public key cryptography, to provide authentication,
> non-repudiation, data integrity, and confidentiality. For the maximum
> security available, eCash uses 768-bit RSA keys
> with 3-DES. eCash is a very efficient protocol, which
> enables key lengths to increase over time without unduly
> impacting performance. eCash uses Secure Hash Algorithm
> (SHA-1) for its cryptographic hash function. eCash owns
> and uses a patented blind signature encoding algorithm that
> allows banks to issue eCash, which can be sent from
> consumer to merchant in complete privacy. As financial
> institutions develop interoperable certificate authorities for issuing
> digital certificates, eCash will apply standard bank digital certificates
> to eCash payment protocols."
>
>
> Website is still in the construction phase and only limited info there.
> The 768-bit RSA keys seem a little small and I am not all that sure that
> 3-DES is the best choice of symetric algorithms for this application.
Those sound optimized for smartcard use.
Single DES cores are pretty small and can be called 3 times
to do 3DES. RSA keys take a lot of storage and smartcards
are slow to do RSA (or they're more expensive). I'd prefer to
see 1024 bit RSA also, but I can understand why they'd use 768.
And that's way better than some other systems I'm seeing...
--
Eric Murray www.lne.com/~ericm ericm at the site lne.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5
