On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:44:10 -0500
Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
The problem here is not that you might infringe the patent, the
problem is that if a patent suit is brought against you, it will cost
a minimum of about $5 million to defend. Just to get to the point of
having an opinion on the matter you would have to engage a competent
expert witness who was willing to work on patent stuff rather than
building stuff. Then they have to do maybe a months work on research
and explain the results to a group of lawyers. You are going to have
five or more people and rack up several thousand hours at lawyer
rates.
Those costs buy a lot of crypto accelerator boards.
I kept trying to explain this situation to the various people who
tried to sell their 'efficient CRL' hacks. Even if your system is the
greatest ever and you give it to me for free, it will cost more to
work out if it is legally safe than it costs to solve the problem with
raw CPU power.
If the 512 byte limit really is a problem, then the logical answer
would be to use DSA-SHA256 since the signatures generated in DSA are
not a function of the key size. DSA also allows for offline
calculation of the signature data which would address performance
issues for companies like Akamai.
There are also reasons to beware of DSA. Steve Bellovin pointed out
that if the random number generator is bad the private key can leak
out. But RSA is not without similar issues, companies that can't
generate a good random seed for DSA will probably not create secure
keypairs for RSA either.
I've pointed it out in the IETF, but I'm certainly not the one who came
up with that observation in the first place; please do not give me
credit for other folks' work.
More on-topic: unless I'm very much mistaken, DNScurve relies on
transmission security rather than object security; in turn, that
requires a pretty fundamental change in how the DNS works. (Well, not
completely, but you wouldn't gain any security benefit against most of
the threats from cache contamination if you didn't change it.) Maybe
the DNS can work that way or should work that way -- but I haven't seen
any analysis to show that the load is manageable without caching and
with lots of banging on the authoritative servers.
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