Re: Diffie-Hellman DomainParameters question

[pgut001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Gutmann)]

"william bamberg" <william.bamberg@symbian.com> writes:

>I'm not a crypto expert, but I understand that the q value is not actually
>essential for doing Diffie-Hellman, and most D-H certificates that I've come
>across seem to omit it. Could anyone explain to me why it's not optional in
>the spec?

This is required by the particular version of X9.42 which was current when the
RFC 2459 draft was written, <grumble>ignoring the fact that pretty much the 
only thing which uses DH and DH certs is SSL/Skip/etc, which use PKCS #3 
DH</grumble>.

(I was very restrained there, I didn't post the 3-page rant which any mention
 of X9.42 usually triggers :-).

Peter.