ietf-openpgp
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Re: The purpose of this mailing list

1997-09-11 23:42:31
PS: I'd like to see at least one EC in the list of "MAY" asymmetric algos. 
 
You have to be *very* careful about this, because there are so many variables 
and parameters involved (field type, representation, field parameters, use of 
point compression, etc etc) that unless you decide on some useful constraints 
you'll end up with either specific, optimised implementations which don't 
interoperate because they use different parameters than everyone else, or 
incredibly complex and inefficient general-purpose solutions.  I think the 
best approach would be to take P1363 and define an interoperability profile 
for PGP (MUST use this field type, this curve, point compression, etc etc).  A 
good meet-in-the-middle approach is to take an existing, high-quality PD 
implementation which anyone can use, an example being George Barwood's pegwit 
code (there's a link to it somewhere on 
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/links.html), and defining the parameters 
to match what the implementation does.  This sets a basic level of EC support 
which is required to interoperate, and simultaneously provides an 
implementation of the base level which anyone can use.
 
Peter.


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