1751: A Convention for Human-Readable 128-bit Keys.

The Internet community has begun to address matters of security. Recent standards, including version 2 of SNMP [GM93], have explicit requirements for an authentication mechanism. These require use of a keyed message-digest algorithm, MD5 [Riv92], with a key size of 128- bits. A 128-bit key, while sufficiently strong, is hard for most people to read, remember, and type in. This memo proposes a convention for use with Internet applications & protocols using 128- bit cryptographic keys.