[CFRG] Re: I-D Action: draft-irtf-cfrg-rsa-guidance-01.txt

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

Hello,

With apologies for wading in while short on both context and sleep:

Alicja Kario <[e-mail]> wrote:
> RSA key generation is a very rare occurance, so it's easier to just
> do it offline, on a trusted system, than to work to make it side
> channel safe. So, no, I consider it out of scope.

This strikes me as an assumption that makes things clean on paper but
messy in the real world. I can imagine lots of users taking one look
at the operational hassle of offline generation and saying "not worth it."

An alternative take: RSA key generation is a very rare occurrence, so it does
not have to be particularly fast. Thus, we can afford to spend significant
computational resources on attenuating the side channels.

(Well, and implementation time, etc.)

I'll stress again that I could be entirely mistaken about the context. But
my experience has been that users of all stripes are pesky and tend to do
what is easiest for them. And a subset of those users will not correctly
decide which system should be trusted for offline generation.

Take this drive-by opinion for what (very) little it is worth :)

Cheers,

-=rsw