Subject: SSH implementaion - using MSCAPI Vs JCE

From: Anandha S Srinivasan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 16:19:00 +0530

Hi,

We are in the early stages of implementing SSH support for our terminal
emulation product (MS Windows based). I would like to see some information
on whether using JCE Vs MSCAPI interfaces will give any advantage with
respect to development of SSH (actually SSH2).

Can you throw some light on this?

Bye / Tschuess / Arrivederci / Adeus / Adiós,
Anand.

Int'l Business Machines,
Bangalore.

"Be yourself, no matter what they say" - From "Englishman in New York" (The
Police)

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From: [email-masked] (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:15:38 +1300

Anandha S Srinivasan <[email-masked]> writes:

>emulation product (MS Windows based). I would like to see some information on
>whether using JCE Vs MSCAPI interfaces will give any advantage with respect to
>development of SSH (actually SSH2).

I can't see that either would give any advantage, all you'll be using is very
low-level stuff like RSA, 3DES, DH (actually I'm not sure how widely DH is
supported in deployed CryptoAPI CSPs, that may be a point against it).  So
it's really a case of do you want to be tied to Microsoft Windows or tied to
Java?

(It'd probably be easier to just grab OpenSSH, Putty, cryptlib (ahem :-),
 wodSSH, or some other code base that does SSH for you, rather than building
 everything yourself from scratch.  Adding glue code to call your favourite
 crypto algorithm library, whether it's JCE or CAPI, is about 0.01% of the
 total work involved).

Peter.

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From: Joseph Galbraith <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 08:57:55 -0700

>it's really a case of do you want to be tied to Microsoft Windows or tied to
I believe last time we looked at it, CAPI didn't expose the DH 
primitives sufficiently to implement
SSH2 on top of them.  (I'm a little vague, but I think the problem was 
that you can't get the raw
k out of CAPI, but only a key derived from k by CAPI-- using a different 
algorithm than that
specified by SECSH naturually.)

- Joseph