Re: [Cfrg] New names for draft-ladd-safecurves

[Jon Callas <[e-mail]>]

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On Jan 20, 2014, at 7:54 PM, Watson Ladd <[e-mail]> wrote:

>> Really, there's no reason to designate in the name an Edwards curve from a Montgomery, especially because in the implementation someone's probably going to flip between representations. Only us math weenies really care about the representation, and you're going to confuse the coders.
> 
> If I hand you a string of bytes, what point does that represent and on
> what curve does it fall? Seems to me like that's a representation
> issue we should all care about.

I think that's *the* issue we should care about.

> 
>> 
>> I spent time talking to Dan and Tanja this weekend at ShmooCon about this sort of thing and I think that our agreement was that names like "Curve 255-19" (which covers both Curve25519 and Ed25519) or "Curve 414-17" (for the curve formerly known as Curve3617) made sense.
> 
> This would be great except that we want both Edwards and Montgomery
> wire formats. If there is consensus on only Edwards wire formats, that
> naming will work fine.

Is the name the right place to solve this?

That's not rhetorical, I'm genuinely asking. If you give me a short description of how you'd handle it, I'm liable to just say, "Oh, yeah."

	Jon



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