[NTLUG:Discuss] ssh key generation

[John K. Taber]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 18:00 -0500, Ralph Green, Jr. wrote:
> Howdy,
>   I am generating some new public/private key
> pairs to use for communicating to a new server.
> I have not done this in a while and I am a
> little concerned about how long it is taking.
> The machine is a P2/366 running SuSE 9.3.  I
> issued the command:
>   ssh-keygen -b 8192 -t dsa
>  It has been running for two and a half hours
> so far.  Is it conceivable that it is running
> ok?  I don't seem to be swapping even though
> the system only has 192 meg of ram.
> 

I haven't kept up with crypto in years, but yes, I think it is running
ok. 8k-bits is a large pair to test for relative primality, even with
the optimized probabilistic testing I suspect the program is using.
Offhand, hours sounds reasonable.

Mind you, I have not kept up with the literature and I'm very much out
of date.

John