[Cfrg] Upcoming competition deadlines

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

Dear all,
The Password Hashing Competition and CAESER have deadlines coming up
soon. I strongly encourage anyone interested in these topics, either
as an implementor or designer, to pay attention. It would be
particularly useful to understand usecases in more detail than we do
now. Comments would be strongly helpful for both competitions.

Secondly, a major bug in OpenSSL's implementation of the SEC p256k
implementation was discovered and exploited. The issue was side
channels in control flow and memory accesses, together with new
techniques for using the information gathered to extract private keys.

I think it's clear that we need a side-channels draft: since people
seem to vehemently disagree about ladd-safecurves, and there are some
open technical questions about what formats are good, I'm going to
redirect my efforts to getting the side-channels draft further along.
Comments on what would make it useful/scarier would be greatly
appreciated.

Sincerely,
Watson Ladd