[Cfrg] EC signatures: Quaker poll on preferred scheme, ends on September 24th

[Alexey Melnikov <[e-mail]>]

Dear CFRG,

We previously asked for a short discussion to flush out any last issues or additional points of comparison between the different candidate signature schemes that everyone should be aware of. A few interesting and potentially important topics were raised by various people - thank you for those inputs. Roughly, those topics were:

- IPR considerations
- Implementation and deployment status
- Facility to sign without public key
- Facility to verify without public key
- Reuse of same keys with IUF and non-IUF schemes (but note that, based on the outcome of an earlier poll, we are only working on a scheme for the IUF interface)
- Coordinate system independence

We want to keep these topics in the foreground, but feel strongly that any scheme changes that might be decided upon as a result of their further consideration could equally well be made to any of the current candidates. (If authors of different proposals disagree with this assertion, they should speak up now.)

In view of this, we would now like to run a poll to decide on which one of the current candidates we will take forward and develop. As a reminder, those four candidates are:

"ladd", "liusvaara", "brown", and "eddsa" (Bernstein et al)

with "hamburg" having been eliminated at an earlier stage.

This message starts a 2 weeks Quaker poll that would close on September 24th. Please reply +1 (prefer or greatly favor), 0 (can live with or accept) or -1 (cannot live with or tolerate)) for each of the 4 signature schemes. Short explanation of your position are welcome, but this is not a time for rehashing old debates. Pointing to older messages on the mailing list is also encouraged.

As a usual reminder, please don't discuss other topics in this thread.

Once the poll is completed, and assuming there is a clear preference arising from the group, we (the chairs) will then seek volunteers to join an editorial team whose job will be to develop an Internet draft describing the selected scheme. As usual, that team will be expected to respond to suggestions for changes to the draft that have the CFRG support; we may run further polls to help determine any such changes.

Best Regards,
Kenny and Alexey