Re: [Cfrg] Requirements for curve candidate evaluation update

[Alyssa Rowan <[e-mail]>]

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On 14/08/2014 03:42, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> To be clear, I am arguing that we put HSM support way ahead of a 
> single model. HSM support is essential, a single model is
> someone's idea of tidiness.

That is a null property. Anything we can specify can be implemented in
software or hardware. As I said before, there will _eventually_ be new
HSMs, and new HSM firmware. People have already begun work on that.

The commercial world of this are however glacially slow-moving, partly
due to onerous and ineffective governmental certification requirements
(one of the things that has been - rightly - criticised). Several do
not support ECDSA (or ECDHE, where applicable) properly or at all, and
this is why RSA is still far more common in the wild and ECDSA is
quite honestly barely used by anyone publicly (there are _very few_
ECDSA PKIX roots...) - those that are using it are running it in
software and are therefore not relevant to your 'essential' requirement.

That's about the same as Kevin's problem with military procurement
cycles (in fact, more identical than you think - we are actually
talking about the same vendors/fabs in some cases!).

Inertia mustn't hold us back from recommending anything new and
better, because otherwise we'd _never_ consider anything new.

The TLS WG asked for this because they have new requirements for trust
and performance reasons. Anyone using a commercially-available HSM
obviously doesn't, and are not the intended targets of this proposal
within the timeframe ECC will be useful at all.

Most TLS stakeholders are much, much more agile than that. You can
usually spot the ones that aren't: still using 3DES. :-)

- -- 
/akr
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