Re: [Cfrg] draft-ladd-safecurves-02

On 01/11/2014 11:39 AM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> On Jan 11, 2014, at 8:24 AM, Alyssa Rowan <akr@akr.io> wrote:
>
>> Agreed there. That's a temporary slot, there for the draft, I believe,
>> but the final reference should I think be more like:
>>
>> 7. References
>>
>>     [SAFECURVES] Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange. SafeCurves:
>>     choosing safe curves for elliptic-curve cryptography.
>>     <http://safecurves.cr.yp.to>, accessed 11 November 2014.
>>
>>     [EFD] Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange. Explict-Formulas
>>     Database, Genus-1 curves over large-characteristic fields.
>>     <http://www.hyperelliptic.org/EFD/g1p/>, accessed
>>     11 November 2014.
> Published academic papers would be *much* more useful than web sites that can change.
>
> References in RFCs are not there to prove that the RFC authors did their homework; they are there to help readers assess the validity of statements in the document. When someone reads this RFC 15 years from now, the contents of http://safecurves.cr.yp.to will very likely be more up to date, possibly in a way that negates some of what is said in the document. A reader of the RFC at that point should decide not to implement because of the disagreement between the RFC and the reference; that would be bad.

Plus one; this is an important point.

David

> For crypto documents, references to books (specific editions) and IACR papers seem to work just fine.
>
> --Paul Hoffman
> _______________________________________________
> Cfrg mailing list
> Cfrg@irtf.org
> http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/cfrg
>