Advantage of crypto bit?

[Imran Ghory]

On 5/21/05, Tom H <hellfrozeover at gmail.com> wrote:
> For the signature, does anyone know what the advantage is in doing...
> BASE64(DSA(SHA1("[timestamp]::assert_identity::[identity_url]::[return_url]::[nonce]")))
> 
> over simply...
> SHA1("[timestamp]::assert_identity::[identity_url]::[return_url]::[nonce]")?

SHA1 is simply an hash algorithm so anyone can generate
SHA1("[timestamp]::assert_identity::[identity_url]::[return_url]::[nonce]")
it basically takes that information and compacts it into a smaller
form. DSA is a signing algorithm so the id-server can "sign" the 
output of SHA1 thus guaranteeing that the id-server produced it.

Imran