Re: [saag] A case against algorithm agility (long)

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

On May 5, 2014, at 12:35 PM, S Moonesamy <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Andrey,
> At 19:30 04-05-2014, Andrey Jivsov wrote:
>> It is a good idea to limit the number of possible permutations of allowed algorithms.
>> 
>> However, the pros for the algorithm agility are:
>> * compliance with standards (unless all standards in the world specify the same suite)
> 
> There is an international industry standards group working on a reference architecture.  A draft which was published last month required compliance with a standard in which there is a security issue.
> 
> Is there a possibility that all standards in the world specify the same suite?  That sounds unlikely.  However, I looked at standards from two countries [1] and I found that they were referencing the same standard.

You didn’t say which countries, but if your IPsec/TLS/SSH/SMIME is carrying personal information in Russia, it is required to use GOST.  In Japan you can use Camelia, but I don’t know if that would fulfil the legal requirements in Europe.

That’s the beauty of algorithm agility. The same implementation of these protocols can be used with all of these different algorithms.

So I think Andrey meant national standards as well as IETF, IEEE, or ISO standards.

Yoav