Re: [Cfrg] Point format endian (was: Adoption of draft-ladd-spake2 as a RG document)

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> writes:

>You didn't say why. Why is it a bad idea? What is the downside?

The fact that it's one more piece of special-case code to add, debug, and test
when we've already got perfectly-functional, debugged, and tested code, some
of it in active use for twenty years or more, to do it present everywhere that
uses bignums.

(Another issue is that using a nonstandard form for representing the values is
bound to cause interop problems in the future when the 25519 form is the
opposite to what everything else does.  Look at the mess that occurred during
the AES competition with different endiannesses used in various algorithms,
until the problems were pointed out at the second AES conference by someone
who'd actually implemented things from the spec ("Implementation Experience
with AES Candidate Algorithms") and NIST revised the requirements).

If the "spec" for 25519 is going to be "the standard is to blindly do whatever
djb's code does" then there's no need for a spec or any CFRG involvement, just
provide a link to djb's code, since that'll be the spec.  It's decent code,
I'm not complaining about it, but the CFRG shouldn't be pretending to be
setting any standard if it's just "do whatever this code happens to do".  The
code then becomes the spec.

Peter.