Smartcards and tokens

Andrew Gallagher andrewg at andrewg.com
Sun Dec 18 01:30:36 CET 2016


> On 18 Dec 2016, at 00:17, sivmu <sivmu at web.de> wrote:
> 
> ... that this means RSA encrzption is reproducable, meaning encrypted
> files of the same plaintext result in the same ciphertext, as this woul
> make the process reproduceable and any malfunction can be easily noticed.

No, because the plaintext is symmetric-encrypted with a random session key on the host. The smartcard just asymmetric-encrypts the session key. This two step process is used mainly because asymmetric encryption is comparatively slow, but it also means that two identical plain texts won't get encrypted to the same ciphertext, due to the random session key. 

A



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