Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[email protected]> writes:

> cool, thanks, i'll look into that further.

You can start with Handbook of Applied Cryptography, sec. 3.6 (available
as pdfs at http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/).

>> For DH, I don't think there's any particular reason to prefer to work in
>> a small subgroup. But I may be missing something, of course.
>
> I can think of a few, but i'm not sure how legitimate they are:
>
> One is based on minimized entropy: If you know your small subgroup is of
> size q, then you need less entropy to choose your secret A in the DH key
> exchange, since it never needs to exceed q.

I doubt this matters, if you have a decent and properly seeded
pseudorandomness generator.

> another might be efficiency of modular exponentiation: if you use
> exponentiation by squaring, then the cost of calculating A' = g^A mod p
> where A < q should be O(log_2(q)) instead of O(log_2(p)) where A < p.
> So if q has half the bits of p, you'd halve the amount of computation.

I think this is true also for more sophisticated exponentiation
algorithms. Cost is linear in exponent size.

> The second modular exponentiation (B'^A mod p) would be similarly
> faster.  Both of these factors seem like they might be significant in a
> TLS endpoint that terminates many DHE sessions per second, but i haven't
> profiled them.

Could well be. I'd like to hear what Nikos says about this.

Regards,
/Niels

-- 
Niels Möller. PGP-encrypted email is preferred. Keyid C0B98E26.
Internet email is subject to wholesale government surveillance.
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