From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 95 07:31:16 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: STT - useable in real life ?
In-Reply-To: <199510191347.XAA17540@oznet02.ozemail.com.au>
Message-ID: <199510191430.HAA11213@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


lyalc@ozemail.com.au (lyal collins) writes:

>From reading the STT specs, a 'credential' is made up of typically 4
>certificates - root, country CA, issuer Ca, and cardholder/merchant.
>Two certificates are based upon a 1024 bit public keys, 1 (root) is 2048
>while the cardholder PK is 512/768 bit.
>I believe a decrypt operation is required to verify each certificate.

Usually, decrypt operations are needed to ISSUE certificates but not to
verify them.  Verification is equivalent to an encrypt operation using a
small exponent, and may be roughly about 100 times faster than a decrypt.

Hal