RE: Experimental server for RSA SHA-2

Peter Gutmann <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.secsh
Message-ID <9A043F3CF02CD34C8E74AC1594475C73F4B5BF20@uxcn10-5.UoA.auckland.ac.nz>
Damien Miller <[email protected]> writes:

>I don't think this is right: the hash used in the signature algorithm has
>always been independent of the key exchange hash. 

Is it?  I hope I'm not reading this wrong, but the exchange hash H is what's
signed, and that's what's calculated using the hash algorithm HASH, which is
specified by e.g. "diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256".  So
"server_host_key_algorithms" can say RSA or DSA or ECDSA, but not the hash,
since that's implicit from "kex_algorithms".

>I don't really care for bikeshedding names, but if I were picking it, then it
>would be "rsa-pss-sha256".

It definitely needs to indicate quite clearly that it uses a signature form
that's not compatible with anything else that SSH has ever used.  I'd vote for
"crunchy-raw-unboned-real-dead-frog-rsa-pss".

Could I also suggest that the draft include a facility to use standard PKCS #1
sigs?  I really don't want to have to implement a nonstandard (meaning not
used by any other part of SSH, or any other protocol like PGP, S/MIME, TLS,
etc) signature format just to be able to use SHA-256 in a sig.

Peter.
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