DSA default algorithm for keytool -genkeypair. Bad choice?
Anthony Scarpino
anthony.scarpino at oracle.com
Wed Oct 10 21:05:48 UTC 2018
On 10/10/2018 07:42 AM, Weijun Wang wrote:
>
>
>> On Oct 10, 2018, at 7:59 PM, Sean Mullan <sean.mullan at oracle.com> wrote:
>>
>> There is really no other reason other than DSA keys have been the default keypairs generated by keytool for a long time, so there are some compatibility issues we would have to think through before changing it to another algorithm such as RSA. Weijun might have more insight into that.
>
> Not really. It was the default before I join Sun Microsystems many many years ago. Maybe it was a NIST standard?
>
> As for compatibility, as long as someone is still using DSA then they might not be specifying the -keyalg option.
>
> If not DSA, should RSA be the new default? Or maybe RSASSA-PSS (I wonder if RSASSA-PSS signature can always use legacy RSA keys) or EC? We don't have an option to specify ECCurve in keytool yet (a string -keysize).
>
> --Max
>
>
I would rather get rid of the default completely.
I realize there maybe scripting issues with that. If we made some
documentation guarantees a default algorithm then maybe we are stuck
with having a default and can use a security property. A part of me
thinks it would be foolish for an application to assume a default
algorithm and may deserve to be broken so they can fix it.
Even if we didn't remove defaults from older java version, in future
releases it would be nice to eliminate defaults were possible.
With regard to a replacement, I'd prefer over EC than RSA given a
choice. But either is ok.
Tony
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