Originally posted by Dan Murphy:
I need to generate tokens that will be used to identify users between two systems. Ideally I'd like the tokens to be strings of a fixed length, containing only ASCII characters. Because the tokens will be used to uniquely identify users, each token generate must be unique (or the possibility of collisions should be very small).
Converting the binary output to ASCII is trivial, use UUEncode, MIME, HEX, etc.
How do you plan to
exchange the tokens? The only hard part of stong crypto is key management. All the rest is just using the algorithms.
You could hire an ex-Secret Service agent, have him carry the secret in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, etc. like the old spy movies. It gets kinda expensive.
RSA was invented to help manage keys, and it works. But its probably overkill for you application. Kinda hard to tell from the OP.