Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++

7.15. Using the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA)

Problem

You want to perform public key-based digital signatures, and you have a requirement necessitating the use of DSA.

Solution

Use an existing cryptographic library’s implementation of DSA.

Discussion

DSA and Diffie-Hellman are both based on the same math problem. DSA only provides digital signatures; it does not do key agreement or general-purpose encryption. Unlike Diffie-Hellman, the construction is quite a bit more complex. For that reason, we recommend using an existing implementation. If you must implement it yourself, obtain the standard available from the NIST web site (http://www.nist.gov).

With DSA, the private key is used to sign arbitrary data. As is traditionally done with RSA signatures, the data is actually hashed before it’s signed. The DSA standard mandates the use of SHA1 as the hash function.

Anyone who has the DSA public key corresponding to the key used to sign a piece of data can validate signatures. DSA signatures are most useful for authentication during key agreement and for non-repudiation. We discuss how to perform authentication during key agreement in Recipe 8.18, using Diffie-Hellman as the key agreement algorithm.

DSA requires three public parameters in addition to the public key: a very large prime number, p; a generator, g; and a prime number, q, which is a 160-bit prime factor of p - 1.^[4] Unlike the generator in Diffie-Hellman, the DSA generator is not a small constant. Instead, it’s a computed value ...