Re: gnupg rsa question // why use e of 41 ?

vedaal wrote:
>/* find an public exponent.
> We use 41 as this is quite fast and more secure than the
> commonly used 17. Benchmarking the RSA verify function
> with a 1024 bit key yields (2001-11-08):

This is a suspicious comment and indicates to me that maybe the
developer is not fully up to speed on all of the literature on the
security of RSA. If you use a proper padding mechanism, there's no
known reason to use larger values of e; you might as well use e=3 (or,
even better, e=2, with the appropriate care). If you don't use proper
padding, you may be screwed no matter what exponent you choose.
Maybe someone just needs to educate this programmer a little more
about RSA. I wouldn't take this as indicative of some attack on e=17.
Received on Mon May 1 02:05:46 2006