Re: [IPsec] I-D on Using the ECC Brainpool Curves for IKEv2 Key Exchange

[Stephen Kent <[e-mail]>]

Folks,

I think my initial concern has been misunderstood, or maybe I 
misunderstood the
purported benefits of the proposed mechanism.

When I asked about compatibility with existing S/MIME specs, I was not 
referring to
details of how the EC public key is represented in  a cert, per se.

Andrey's message on 1/4 said:

"Point compression is more beneficial for storage security for reasons 
of performance and storage efficiency. For storage efficiency side: when 
there are multiple recipients per message, each associated with one 
ECDH-related field, it's possible for ECDH-specific payload to get 
arbitrary large for a fixed short message. For the performance argument: 
*if the message was encrypted to N recipients, to decode it only one 
recipient will be used, and thus the calculation of 'y' is done once but 
the space is saved for N. *

My question was whether this technique, in bold above, is compatible 
with the current, normal
processing for S/MINE, or whether it would require S/MIME to operate 
differently (at the originator
or at any recipient) in order to reduce the overhead in the fashion 
alluded to above.

I don;t think that question has been answered.

Steve