generating RSA keypair with non-standard public exponents

[Klaus Heinrich Kiwi]

I noted that when generating a RSA public key pair using a non-standard 
public exponent (particularly, 65538, or 0x01, 0x00,0x02), the 
RSA_generate_key never returns, and the program keeps using 100% CPU 
until I kill it.

My question is: Is this behavior expected? If some non-standard publ. 
exponent is problematic, shouldn't we abort with error before attempting 
to use it?

Or, to put it in another way, should the caller validate the public 
exponent before issuing RSA_generate_key(), to avoid a potential DoS?

Thanks,

 -Klaus


--
Klaus Heinrich Kiwi | kla...@br.ibm.com | http://blog.klauskiwi.com
Open Source Security blog :     http://www.ratliff.net/blog
IBM Linux Technology Center :   http://www.ibm.com/linux/ltc

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