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Technology Stocks : Security Technologies - Straight Talk -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joggins who wrote (55)	9/13/1998 5:40:00 PM
From: caly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206

Joggins, There is no concept of breaking a public key. A public key is just that...public. There is nothing secret about it and there's no reason to keep it secret. The private key of the public/private key pair what MUST be protected. If the private key is comprised, all security is lost with the holder of that key pair. This is why the best security solutions will provide a secure physical token of some sort to protect the private key. The concept of using public key technology to secure the delivery of a secret key for subsequent encryption is exactly what is specified in the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) standard. (You may know this as ISAKMP/Oakley.) It is part of the more general IPsec security standards. IKE not allows for this capability, it also allows the two parties to negotiate what encryption, hashing and authentication algorithm they will use during the key exchange. It is an extremely powerful and flexible key management protocol which is why it's been embraced by all the major security players (including network players like Cisco). calypso Here is a link that shows the current players that have made it through the IPsec certification process... icsa.net

To: Joggins who wrote (55)	9/14/1998 9:37:00 AM
From: Enam Luf	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206

Joggins and Calypso, Both of you make some interesting points. While my understanding of the technology is more along the line of what Calypso describes, I think Joggins raises an interesting point. From what I've read, I believe that private key encryption, properly implemented, is actually the more secure method of transmission (hence the govt's reliance upon DES). However, in a distributed network environment such as the Internet, where the number of possible communication points are so large, the problem in implementing a symmetric (private) key system is in the management of those keys. As both parties involved in a transaction must share the private key to decode the message, trying to safely implement such a system over the public Internet would seem a daunting task. Public key was created primarlily to address this issue of key management. Enam