Secret key storage question

Gordon Worley redbird at rbisland.cx
Tue Jun 18 20:57:01 CEST 2002


On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 01:40  PM, Robert J. Hansen wrote:

> That's an obvious example; there may well be more subtle ones, depending
> on your platform and how fragile your C library's string calls are.
> Stick to ASCII 32-127.

Actually, better make that 126, since 127 is DEL.

Also, doing the math, I get the following for the suggested longest 
passphrase length (maybe you can point out what I've got wrong):

2^128 possible possibilities for the symmetric key
Passphrase contains any char between 32 and 126, so that's 95 possible 
chars
x is the recommended passphrase length
95^x ~= 2^128
log(95, 2^128) = x
ln(2^128)/ln(95) = ~19.48
x = 20

--
Gordon Worley - Mac GPG Project
http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/              ``Doveriai no proveriai.''
redbird at rbisland.cx                                --Russian proverb
PGP:  0xBBD3B003





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