From sfrost at snowman.net Fri Jul 25 17:20:38 2003 From: sfrost at snowman.net (Stephen Frost) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 11:20:38 -0400 Subject: [Help-gnutls] Security of RSA params Message-ID: <20030725152038.GA2684@ns.snowman.net> Greetings, In the source code I see places where the RSA params are generated and there are comments like "Only do this ever day, or every 500 connects" or similar. I'd like to understand what the story with these params is. It seems they need to be regenerated every so often for the system to not be compramised but exactly what would happen if they were, and how hard is it for them to be? What I'm wondering, specifically, is this: Are these params given to the client at some point? Can they be used to derive the session key? Most importantly: Can one client decrypt another client's session trivially if the same RSA params are used for both? OpenLDAP has been ported to use GNU TLS but it is currently not explicitly generating/setting the RSA params. From what I've read these params are probably generated on the fly by GNU TLS for every session because of this. This causes a significant increase in the CPU utilization of the slapd processes. Other programs (exim, for example) appear to generate these params and then save them for use with multiple sessions. Should OpenLDAP do the same? Would security be compramised by doing this? Many thanks, Stephen -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: