Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SAI_Peregrinus 957 days ago
I'd say encryption and PKCS#1v1.5. The latter is just hard enough to implement safely that it's quite likely to be vulnerable, but not so obviously bad as to be considered definitively broken & set for removal. PKCS#1v1.5 support might not be a deliberate backdoor, but allowing it in a new protocol today would be suspicious.

We went to curves largely due to the flaws of PKCS#1v1.5, not so much due to RSA itself being bad (though the false sense of simplicity it has is certainly dangerous). RSASSA-PSS verification is fast, so while the keys & signatures are big there's still some reason to use it for constrained devices.