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Re: [Cfrg] Point format endian

Tony Arcieri <bascule@gmail.com> Tue, 27 January 2015 19:40 UTC

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References: <9A043F3CF02CD34C8E74AC1594475C73AAF68325@uxcn10-tdc05.UoA.auckland.ac.nz> <54C76EED.6090205@cs.tcd.ie> <sjm386wjko8.fsf@securerf.ihtfp.org>
From: Tony Arcieri <bascule@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 11:40:27 -0800
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To: Derek Atkins <derek@ihtfp.com>
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Cc: Peter Gutmann <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz>, "cfrg@irtf.org" <cfrg@irtf.org>
Subject: Re: [Cfrg] Point format endian
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On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 7:41 AM, Derek Atkins <derek@ihtfp.com> wrote:

> PKIX, OpenPGP, OpenSSH, Kerberos, TLS...  Pretty much every existing
> IETF security standard I know of to date encodes numbers in big-endian
> format.


Yet when it comes to running code, OpenSSH and GPG 2.1 are both using the
little endian versions of Curve25519 and Ed25519 already...

All of the existing material describing Curve25519 and Ed25519 describes it
in terms of little endian.

Changing the endianness now would break compatibility with all of the
existing running code and documentation, and for what? Why are we breaking
things and creating a pointless incompatibility?

"A foolish consistency..."

-- 
Tony Arcieri

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