Re: [CFRG] Comment on draft-irtf-cfrg-hash-to-curve-10

["Riad S. Wahby" <[e-mail]>]

Hello Daira,

Thanks for clarifying your feedback.

I remain concerned about mixing implementation detail with high-level
description. Here I am referring to using divsqrt in place of natural
field arithmetic operations (sqrt, inversion, etc.) in the body text.
Describing the algorithm independent of the implementation details is
a way of specifying the mathematical properties of the algorithm, and
having this specification explicit in the document has value, from my
perspective.

But as I said in my prior email, it seems like refactoring Appx. G to
use divsqrt and adding a few implementations of that function for the
relevant cases (3 mod 4, 5 mod 8, 9 mod 16, and general, perhaps?) is
a nice way of cleaning things up. And it seems like the same refactor
applied to SvdW and Elligator in Appx. G would help, too.

This isn't something I can do in the near term, but I'm very happy to
spend time on this once I've got some! I'm hopeful that's about three
weeks from now, but I've been called an optimist before.

Thanks again for the feedback and best regards,

-=rsw