On 2 July 2013 15:03, Kalpesh Parekh <kalpesh.ork2_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>From: Alexander Lamaison <swish_at_lammy.co.uk>
>>Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 09:57:53 +0100
>
>>On 2 July 2013 07:34, Kalpesh Parekh <kalpesh.ork2_at_gmail.com> >wrote:
>
>> Hi Alex
>>
>> The APIs I am using are libssh2_session_hostkey to retreive the host >key
>> and
>> libssh2_hostkey_hash to compute the hash from the key.
>>
>> The first API returns the length of the host key in a variable passed to
>> >it
>> as a function argument. The variable is of size_t type and indicates >the
>> size of host key. I need to convert this value to bits. Can you let me
>> >know
>> how can I do this?
>>Why do you need to convert it to bits? What does that actually mean?
>>The size_t length is just a number.
>
> The requirement is to show the strength of the host key in bits. I assumed
> the length of the host key should be indicating this value and tried to
> convert it to bits from size_t.
The length of the host key returned by session_hostkey is the exact
size of the buffer holding the "server public host key and
certificates (K_S)" in bytes (see RFC 4253 [1]). I'm not sure of the
exact relationship between that and the key strength, but another part
of RFC 4253 [2] indicated that that buffer may include a "format
identifier" (presumably ssh-rsa or ssh-dsa) before the key data.
Therefore, I wouldn't trust that they key strength is the returned
length * 8.
> How does ssh-keygen -l calcuate the strength
> in bits?
It extract the actual key data and counts the significant bits of one
of the key fields. For DSA the prime, for RSA the modulus.
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4253#section-8
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4253#section-6.6
Alex
-- Swish - Easy SFTP for Windows Explorer (http://www.swish-sftp.org) _______________________________________________ libssh2-devel http://cool.haxx.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libssh2-develReceived on 2013-07-03