Subject: Minor references problems in transport-22

From: Ben Harris <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 23:34:27 +0000 (GMT)

While working on draft-harris-ssh-rsa-kex, I found a few problems in the 
core drafts.  Here are the ones from draft-ietf-secsh-transport-22.txt:

It states, regarding ssh-rsa keys:

    Signing and verifying using this key format is done according to
    [SCHNEIER] and [RFC3447] using the SHA-1 hash.

I haven't got a copy of Schneier here, but I do know that RFC 3447 
specifies two RSA signature schemes, RSASSA-PSS and RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5. 
The latter seems to be the scheme that SSH uses, and it should probably be 
specified explicitly:

    Signing and verifying using this key format is done according to
    [SCHNEIER] and [RFC3447] using the RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 scheme and
    the SHA-1 hash.

On the subject of SHA-1, transport-22 only refers to [SCHNEIER] for its 
definition, and then only in the context of HMAC.  It might be better to 
reference the NIST document that defines it:

    [FIPS-180-2]
               National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
               "Secure Hash Standard (SHS)", FIPS PUB 180-2, August 2002.

Similarly, for MD5 a reference to RFC 1312 might be appropriate.

-- 
Ben Harris