Re: gsu (Was Re: More Political Stuff)

[Nathan Hurst <njh hawthorn csse monash edu au>]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> kind of signature in the themes too, to allow signing (I've never really
> understand HOW that makes things safer, seeing as how anyone can just
> copy the signature... but everyone else seems to like using signatures
> all the time...)

Digital signatures are computed from the checksum of the file and a
private key in such a way that to check the authenticity of the key, only
a publicly available key is required, but to generate the key, a secret
key is required.  To 'just copy the signature..' you would need to be able
to break a scheme like RSA.

njh