help me understand something, fellow Debian folk, please!

Diffie-Hellman and its offspring Oakley allow two parties to agree on
a session key without exchanging sensitive information. To do so, they
use a private/public key pair and the wonders of the modulus operator.

Say two hosts establish a VPN with Oakley and IKE. Both hosts have
X.509 certificates. Do they use these straight in the DH/Oakley
calculation every time, or are they simply used to seed the temporary
generation of a key pair that's then used for DH?

I am asking because I was always under the impression of the former,
but wondering how the two hosts agree on a different session key
every time they rerun the process. or do they use the generated
communication-partners key as a basis to create a temporary session
key?

thanks,

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
  \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; net@madduck
 
a good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.

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