🚀 go-pugleaf

Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@whale.cs.indiana.edu) wrote:
: >I notice that one RIPEM public key in the public server file has its
: >first 34 characters identical to my ripem public key. Perhaps this is
: >related. It seems an unlikely coincidence, given that the two keys
: 
: #=== Documentation ===
: #
: #-- Explain that all keys start with a PKCS identifier, so people won't
: #think RIPEM has a bug that makes all keys similar.
: 
: This probably explains much, if not all, of the similarity.

Yes, I really ought to make this point in the documentation.
RIPEM uses MD5 is a pseudo-random-number generator in producing
keys (both keypairs and message keys).  MD5 makes a very high-quality
PRNG.  RIPEM keys are encoded according to OSI's Distinguished
Encoding Rules, using PKCS identifiers.  This puts a lot of constant
bytes at the beginning of the key, so a program can tell exactly
what it's dealing with.  If the key format is changed in the
future, RIPEM will be able to figure out that a given key was
in an old format and (presumably) adjust accordingly.
See the "pkcs" documents
available from rsa.com.

/mrr