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Re: RSA PSS in SSH?



Am Monday 22 November 2010 schrieb Niels Möller:
> My understanding is that the pkcs#1 v1.5 padding is a much more severe
> problem for encryption than for signing, mostly related to chosen
> ciphertext attacks.
> 
> But I'm not a cryptologist. How important is it to obsolete v1.5 padding
> for signatures? What attacks are there?

There are no attacks. It's purely an extra-safety measure.

PSS has two advantages: First, it provides a security "proof" under the 
asumption that the RSA problem itself is hard and the random oracle model. 
Roughly speaking, PKCS #1 1.5 padding has no known flaws, but you can't proove 
that it doesn't have flaws - with PSS, you can.

The other thing is that PSS adds randomization - this often makes 
implementation flaws harder to exploit (for example fault-based attacks).

So there is no high pressure on implementing PSS, but it is a useful extra 
security measure on the long term.

-- 
Hanno Böck		Blog:		http://www.hboeck.de/
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