[pycrypto] Things that go bump in the night (qNEW)

Thorsten Behrens sbehrens at gmx.li
Wed Dec 29 21:55:41 CST 2010


I've been looking at the functions that don't have unit tests, among 
them PublicKey/qNEW. It puzzled me for a bit - qNEW is not an algorithm 
I know, can successfully google for, or find in other crypto packages.
Looking at the source, though, it seems to be a cousin of DSA, with a 
few differences in the fundamentals (bit sizes of q and p, for one), and 
a lot of differences in the specifics.

I am not going to write any unit tests for qNEW.

It may be a DSA-variant, in which case it is covered already by DSA.py. 
Or it may be a DSA-derivative that's never been standardized, and thus 
scrutinized, and if that's true, then it should just be stricken from 
the code. Given that there's really no documentation on it either in the 
package or anywhere, I'd wager beer that it's not in serious use 
anywhere, anyway.

Thorsten



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