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

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

On Jan 11, 2014, at 8:24 AM, Alyssa Rowan <[e-mail]> 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.

For crypto documents, references to books (specific editions) and IACR papers seem to work just fine.

--Paul Hoffman