Re: [GNU Crypto] Documentation

[Casey Marshall]

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On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 06:59:57AM +1000, Raif S. Naffah wrote:

> On Mon, 26 May 2003 05:23 am, baz wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > How about renaming 'Stage.getInstace'?  :-)
>                                    ^^
> to what?  once the Cacscade and Assembly are documented, it should 
> become easy(ier) to have a clear mental image of what the building 
> blocks are --and the names then would make more sense.  (this is the 
> theory at least :-)
> 

To 'getInstance'.

> > Lastly, there is nothing in the library for generating keys. Correct
> > me if I'm wrong but I thought that not all encryption schemes use an
> > entirely random sequence of bits for their keys. Don't some require a
> > certain parity?
> 
> true.  certain algorithms exhibit certain "weakness" with some specific 
> key values (i.e. weak and semi-weak keys); e.g. DES.  currently, the 
> library does not ensure/enforce such constraints.  this will be 
> addressed in future versions.
> 

DES does contain static methods for testing if a given key is weak, as
well as methods for testing/altering the parity bits. It's trivial to
add a test for them in the initialization.

The parity bits are now just an anachronism; if you give a non-parity
adjusted key to the makeKey method, it will produce the same result as a
parity adjusted key (erm, probably).

So, isn't it the case that you can feed any arbitrary key bytes (of the
proper length) into any of the ciphers, and be guaranteed that they will
work?

- -- 
Casey Marshall || address@hidden
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