The banking district here in Panama City is normally known as the Area Bancaria. Today I foolheartedly went to the bank. Leaving the bank the formerly slight drizzle had turned in to a fully fledged Panama down pour. I mentioned Fool heartedly earlier, as this happens everyday at around this time, but normally I have the good sense to stay in my office during that period.

I sat waiting on the banks steps, while in less than 10 minutes a foot and a half or more of water was collected in the road in front of the bank, thus converted from Area Bancaria to Mar Bancario. If any of you know Panama, its the road infront of the entrance to the Banco Continental tower. Granted this was at the bottom of a hill and its lower there than on Calle 50 to the left. Still, it was amazing to see.

Being a boring semi gringo type wanting to get back to the office, I grew impatient and started legging it the back way meeting up with my wife on way. Now Im sitting in a nice airconditioned office with my legs wet half ways to my knees. My socks are drying behind the fan of my pc as we dont normally have any need for radiators here.

If anyone wants to gleefully follow the last month and a half of “Winter” we’ve got here, there is no better site than The Panama Canal’s Weather Radar Movie which is continuously updated. Panama City is right in the center and Las Perlas where the current US Series of Survivor was filmed is the large archipelago at the bottom right.

Its been accepted knowledge for several years now that in relation to performance only, DSA is faster for Key Generation and Signing and RSA is faster for Verification.

I was googling for numbers to back this up. I remember seing this info ages ago, but to no avail and I did the geek thing and wrote a quick little benchmark tool to calculate the times.

So here are the scores:

So basically key generation is incredibly faster for DSA, which makes sense if you understand the algorithms. Signing is also faster for DSA, but not by as large a factor. RSA’s great strength is verifying which is much faster than DSA.

Essentially this confirms what I had heard before. NeuClear supports both key types, but we recommend using RSA. For applications where signing performance is the most important such as in SSL web server applications, DSA would probably be the preferable. However NeuClear has to perform many verifications (in fact the whole framework is built on verified objects), thus RSA is better.

None of this discussion covers the relative security of the two algorithms. It is also naive two compare key sizes between algorithms. It is generally agreed in the crypto community that RSA is superior.

It would be interesting to do this excercise with Elliptic Curve Cryptography which can use DSA style keys.

BTW, this is all frightfully informal and for these purposes hardware spec etc arent really important, as all I want is a comparison on the same machine of algorithms.

However for the reference the benchmark was run from within IntelliJ IDEA on a JDK1.4.1 on Gentoo Linux running an AMD Athlon XP 1800 (I think).

The source code can be found here

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Panama. The country has been preparing itself for this throughout the year and most buildings are covered with huge Panamanian flags. Virtually all cars have got banners on it and Panamanians from all over the world (including Shoshanna Johnson) have returned home to celebrate.

Starting last night at midnight and lasting until tomorrow here in the city (Colon had a battle against the Colombians on the 5th so they have 3 days holiday there), Avenida Balboa on the Pacific is a large street party. With visiting dignitaries such as Collin Powell, Sean Connery and the president of Taiwan observing the festivities.

It was good fun on the street last night with much beer flowing. Today at 8 the three public stages start with concerts of all sorts.