Suggestions for Further Reading

The P1363 class of preliminary drafts [134] published by IEEE and the PKC standards [254] from RSA Security Inc. are available for free download from Internet sites. However, IEEE’s published standard 1363-2000 is to be purchased against a fee. In addition to the data types and data conversion primitives described in this chapter, the IEEE drafts (P1363, P1363a, P1363.1 and P1363.2) provide encryption/decryption and signature generation/verification primitives and also several encryption and signature schemes based on these primitives. These schemes are very similar to the algorithms that we described in Chapter 5. So we avoided repetition of the same descriptions here. Elaborate encoding procedures are described in the PKCS drafts, but for only RSA-and Diffie–Hellman-based systems. We have reproduced the details in this chapter. The remaining PKCS drafts deal with topics that this book does not directly deal with. A good exception is PKCS #13 that talks about elliptic curve cryptography. This draft is not ready yet; when it is, it may be consulted to learn about the RSA Laboratories’ standards on elliptic-curve cryptography.

At present, the different families of standards do not seem to have mutually conflicting specifications. The IEEE has a (free) mailing list for promoting the development and improvement of the IEEE P1363 standards, via e-mail discussions.

Other Internet Standards include the Federal Information Processing Standards or FIPS [221] from NIST, and RFCs (Request for Comments) from the Internet Engineering Task Force or (IETF) [135].