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

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 1:22 AM, Bodo Moeller <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> > ("Curve" isn't very descriptive, but I've yet to see a more descriptive
>> > name
>> > for this curve that is actually helpful.)
>>
>> NIST isn't useful either as a prefix, but we live with it.
>
>
> I'm fine with "Curve-255-19" (plus possibly a postfix) given that
> "Curve25519" is a reasonably well-known and reasonably unique name in the
> research literature, but I think that "Curve" is much worse a prefix than
> "NIST".  While the latter also doesn't tell you anything specific about a
> given curve, at least it tells you who assigned that name, whereas "Curve"
> is more of a generic honorific than an actual name (curves without "Curve"
> in their name are curves just as much as the others).

So let's drop curve and replace with E, M, or TE to represent the
shape. For the possible generations
(which would support code size reductions with multiple curves over
the same primes) we could use m1,m2 etc.

My alternative is  g1p255-19m486662. g1p indicates genus 1 over a
prime field, 255-19 designates the prime, m486662 indicates
that is the montgomery curve with constant 486662. The problem with
this naming scheme is that it involves remembering a bunch of
constants.

Honestly, if someone could suggest a good naming scheme, I'm all ears.
But names aren't that important: the discussion over encoding formats
is much more important. Using the Safecurves names doesn't appear to
have anything wrong with it, and ends this stupid bikeshedding.
Sincerely,
Watson Ladd
>



-- 
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
Temporary Safety deserve neither  Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin