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

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 7:50 PM, Jon Callas <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> On Jan 20, 2014, at 7:17 PM, Watson Ladd <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> I am proposing that we name the curves with the following scheme: E,
>> M, TE, indicating
>> the curve type, followed by a prime designator. The prime designator
>> will be the concatination
>> of the numbers a and b such that 2^a-b=p if such a and b exist and are
>> small. Otherwise I'll think of something (Ed448 Goldilocks I'm looking
>> at you).
>>
>> Any objections? Or do we have consensus on this change, and I was just
>> to dense to notice?
>>
>> A new version with significant alterations will be hitting the draft
>> server in a few days.
>
> I think it's overkill, myself.
>
> 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 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.


>
>         Jon
>



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