Re: [sidr] Stephen Farrell's No Objection on draft-ietf-sidr-bgpsec-algs-16: (with COMMENT)

[Sean Turner <[e-mail]>]

On Dec 13, 2016, at 06:54, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Stephen Farrell has entered the following ballot position for
> draft-ietf-sidr-bgpsec-algs-16: No Objection
> 
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> The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-sidr-bgpsec-algs/
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> COMMENT:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> - As Randy commented, if the goal is to smallerise the
> packets, it'd have been nice to use eddsa here but I assume
> that wasn't practical due to the timing and the number of
> RPKI elements that'd need to be defined for that? Is that
> right? Did the WG consider using 25519 instead of p256?  If
> not, is it worth asking, just in case everyone loves the
> idea more than this?

We weren’t trying to optimize for the smallest possible packets just smaller than RSA because at the time we were deciding on the algorithm suite, which was circa ’11, 25519 (or really any other EC-based algorithm) wasn’t far enough along the standardization path.  And, you’re right there was a grunch of timing/elements that needed to be come together to make any other EC-based algorithm realistic.

Since we’re now cc'ing the WG on IESG ballot positions it kind of feels like it just got asked ;)  Personally, I think it’s fine the way it is and for what it’s worth there are now interoperable implementations (see below).

> - Documents like this are better with test vectors included
> or referenced. Couldn't you add those or some pointers to
> those?

Would they be better in this draft or in the protocol draft (on the 20170115 IESG telechat)?  Either way I reached out to Oliver Borchers @ NIST who did some interop testing between QuaggaSRx and BIRD [0].  Hoping that doing some packet captures with a simple example (BGPsec packets, private key+certs) wouldn’t be too hard to pull off; it’ll double the size of this draft that’s for sure.

Cheers,

spt

[0] https://tinyurl.com/hdsux2d