Responses to NIST's proposal
Ronald L. Rivest, Martin E. Hellman, John Anderson, John W. Lyons · Communications of the ACM · 1992
Positive AspectsThe following positive aspects of the proposal are worth noting:• The U.S. government has finally recognized the utility of public key cryptography.• The proposal is based on reasonably familiar number-theoretic concepts, and is a variant of the E1-Gamal [1] and Schnorr [5] schemes.• Signatures are relatively short (only 320 bits).• When signing, computation of r can be done before the message m is available, in a "precomputation" step.