[saag] Re: The curve mess, and lessons for more crypto

[Loganaden Velvindron <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 8 Sept 2024 at 02:35, Watson Ladd <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> For the past 9 years we've all tried to forget the fiasco that was the
> process leading up to the publication of RFC 7745. It ruined several
> collegial relationships: I understand some people don't talk to each
> other as a result. It made academics afraid to talk to the IETF,
> leading to issues for working groups like TLS. And as we realize that
> the current situation with ciphersuite registration and ordinary
> crypto RFCs is untenable for the CFRG and other groups, we've not
> really talked about the lessons to learn from it.
>
> I'm going to set forth what I think are the lessons: I understand
> people may disagree. I'm going to endevor not to rehash what was many,
> many emails over 3 years, but the end result was that the curves in
> the original draft "won" while some other proposals went no where, and
> the Brainpool curves still have registrations.
>
> To my mind the fundamental lesson is that the IETF/IRTF consensus
> model does not do well when one proposal must win. Furthermore, as we
> aren't the protocol police, winning doesn't actually do much to
> advance what happens or change the Internet. Therefore we should avoid
> having contests and choose to let participants in the ecosystem decide
> what of several equivalent proposals will survive. This suggests being
> much more lax about WGs introducing crypto proposals and selecting
> them than some views I've heard expressed, because we really cannot
> effectively say no, and saying "only one must survive" does a lot of
> damage.
>
It's pretty clear that de facto adoption is happening for some curves.

(e.g: https://github.com/apache/mina-sshd/commit/4f2ccf885292adde1d3a0d5f9abd9fb513b07688)

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