Cryptography

Digital signature can be used for authentication purposes. A digital signature algorithm uses hash functions to reduce the message down to a digest, then generates the digital signature using the private key.

There are two types of digital signature algorithms:

* RSA Signature
* Digital Signature Standard (DSS)

RSA uses the private key to encrypt the digest to generate the digital signature. DSS is similar to El-Gamal algorithm, it uses the private key and the digest to generate (not encrypt) two 160-bit values which represent the signature. And verification is a mathematical demonstration, using the public key, that those two values could only have been generated by the private key.

# posted by - H - @ 9:07 PM