Agreed.

(Although I don't think that it should weigh heavily if at all, I do want
to note that there are use cases for other exponents outside of WebPKI, eg.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irtf-cfrg-partially-blind-rsa/02/ )

On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 4:16 PM David Adrian <[email protected]> wrote:

> Given the PQ transition, this seems like a particularly low value use of
> time, to fix something that doesn’t appear to be a problem.
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 2:28 AM Hanno Böck <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Thanks for that information.
>>
>> On Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:40:37 -0700 (PDT)
>> Wayne <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > Baseline Requirements only care that it's greater than 3 and not odd,
>> > and all of these are above 65537 but I think it's worth documenting
>> > the outliers given they are few and far between.
>>
>> For what it's worth: I think that should be changed and e=65537
>> should be enforced. (I actually think it was a mistake to begin with
>> to make RSA over-configurable, and the exponent should just be a fixed
>> value and not part of the key.)
>>
>> There are a number of potential RSA weaknesses both with very small RSA
>> exponents (Coppersmith/Håstad attack, Bleichenbacher's Signature
>> Forgery Attack, BERserk) and with small private exponents (Wiener's
>> attack) - which automatically leads to a large public exponent.
>> Having a standard e value of 65537 avoids all of those.
>>
>>
>> Given that non-standard e values are so rare, it may be time to just
>> remove them from the WebPKI ecosystem.
>>
>> --
>> Hanno Böck
>> https://hboeck.de/
>>
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>>
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