David,
you are right, but I meant the difference in speed for public exponents
like F4=0x10001 (17 bits), 0x40000081 (31 bits), or at least
0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFE (64 bits).
Certainly for nowadays RSA keylengths you will see a difference in
operation time for a public exponent with few dozen and a secret
with some thousand bits.
But for small and very small public exponents you will not observe it:
In case of 0x10001 you perform 17 BIGNUM-Operations, for 0x40000081 only
33, i.e. less than twice. Remember also that there is some org stuff in
both cases.

But you are of course free to use a public exponent like 41=0x29 as GPG
does (faster than F4) and with the proposed patch you can generate these
keys with our lovely OpenSSL package ;-)

/Ann.



> Try 
openssl speed rsa
> Private key (large exponent) operations are 1-2
> orders of magnitude slower than public key (small exponent), easily
> observed.  Depending on key length and traffic volume this can be
> very important.
> 
> --David
> 
> Annie Yousar via RT wrote:
>> Small exponents give the advantage of faster signature
>> verification, but in fact you can't really observe that. A prime
>> exponent e theoretically speeds up the prime factor search, 
>> remember that e must be coprime with (p-1) and (q-1), which is more
>>  likely if e is prime. But this is in the GHz Century also not very
>>  important.


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