Subject: Protocol Action: Diffie-Hellman Proof-of-Possession Algorithms to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 09:02:57 -0400

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Diffie-Hellman
Proof-of-Possession Algorithms' <draft-ietf-pkix-dhpop-02.txt> as a
Proposed Standard.  This document is the product of the Public-Key
Infrastructure (X.509) Working Group.  The IESG contact persons are
Jeffrey Schiller and Marcus Leech.

Technical Summary
 
  One of the important requirements in cryptographic protocols is the
  ability for an entity to prove they have possession of a particular
  key. In particular, Certifying Authorities prior to the issuance of a
  certificate, need to prove that the entity for which the certificate
  will be issued in fact does have the private key that corresponds to
  the public key which is included in the certificate.

  The traditional approach used with public key encryption systems such
  as the RSA system is to have the challenger require the entity
  holding a given private key to sign a challenge string.

  However the Diffie-Hellman (DH) algorithm does not directly lend
  itself to providing such signatures, as it is at heart a key
  agreement algorithm.  This document describes two methods for
  producing a signature from a Diffie-Hellman key pair.

Working Group Summary

  Consensus was reached on the approach used in this document.

Protocol Quality

  Jeffrey I. Schiller reviewed this document for the IESG. Furthermore
  the PKIX Working Group contains members with significant
  cryptographic experience who also have reviewed this document.

Note to RFC Editor:

There were some word-wrapping problems introduced in Appendix A of 
the document that need to be corrected:

Appendix A:

OLD:
   DH-Sign DEFINITIONS IMPLICIT TAGS ::=

   BEGIN
   --EXPORTS ALL
   -- The types and values defined in this module are exported for use
   in
   -- the other ASN.1 modules. Other applications may use them for
   their
   -- own purposes.

NEW/FIXED:
   DH-Sign DEFINITIONS IMPLICIT TAGS ::=

   BEGIN
   --EXPORTS ALL
   -- The types and values defined in this module are exported for use
   -- in the other ASN.1 modules. Other applications may use them
   -- for their own purposes.