Michael J. Markowitz wrote:
>
> At 01:19 PM 8/12/99 +0100, Dr Stephen Henson wrote:
> >It is a bit more awkward to use than RSA. Like many things, if it wasn't
> >for the RSA patent hardly anyone would use it.
>
> I have to publicly disagree with this assessment.
[interesting argument deleted]
Perhaps I should have qualified my statement a bit more. I'm not saying
that DSA is useless or DH for that matter. They have relative merits in
certain applications as you point out.
I'm just making a comment on current usage and an opinion on future
usage.
A question that is frequently asked (mainly by those in the US) is if
DSA and DH can be used instead of RSA for SSL and thus avoid RSA patent
problems. The answer being yes you can but...
1. Almost all SSL servers are exclusively RSA.
2. Almost all browsers are exclusively RSA.
3. Hardly any public CAs issue DSA certificates, I only know of Thawte.
Then there's S/MIME which can currently only be used with RSA (yes I
know S/MIME v3 is DSA+DH but I'm talking about current usage).
In that sense hardly anyone uses DSA.
As for the future, we shall see.
Steve.
--
Dr Stephen N. Henson. http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk/
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Senior crypto engineer, Celo Communications: http://www.celocom.com/
Core developer of the OpenSSL project: http://www.openssl.org/
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