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Re: [rtcweb] Security architecture: Making ECDSA mandatory

"Alfred E. Heggestad" <aeh@db.org> Wed, 25 May 2016 10:17 UTC

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To: Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com>, "rtcweb@ietf.org" <rtcweb@ietf.org>
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From: "Alfred E. Heggestad" <aeh@db.org>
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Date: Wed, 25 May 2016 12:17:03 +0200
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Subject: Re: [rtcweb] Security architecture: Making ECDSA mandatory
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On 13/06/15 00:06, Martin Thomson wrote:
> I've opened https://github.com/rtcweb-wg/security-arch/pull/33
>
> This changes the MTI cipher suites to ECDSA and does a little cleanup
> on the corresponding API requirements to more closely match what has
> just landed in the W3C specification.
>
> We discussed ECDSA and the only concerns raised were with
> compatibility.  I've done some testing with other implementations with
> no issues, and ECDSA seems to be well supported on all those
> hard-to-upgrade PSTN gateways (thanks to Cullen and Ethan for helping
> out with checks there and to NIST for creating certification pressure
> with FIPS-2).
>
> I have an implementation that switches Firefox to ECDSA with P-256 by
> default.  It's much, much faster.  http://bench.cr.yp.to/ claims that
> it's 150 times faster on mobile devices for keygen.
>

I can confirm this. Here at Wire.com we are using ECDSA certs for the
DTLS connections. Generating self-signed certs takes around 1 millisecond.



/alfred

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