Re: [TLS] Comparative cipher suite strengths

Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@sun.com> Fri, 24 April 2009 17:17 UTC

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Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:09:26 -0500
From: Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@sun.com>
To: Vipul Gupta <Vipul.Gupta@sun.com>
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Subject: Re: [TLS] Comparative cipher suite strengths
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On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 09:23:23AM -0700, Vipul Gupta wrote:
> I'm curious to learn why the discussion doesn't branch out to consider  
> ECC (e.g. RFC4492) instead of RSA? ECC is supported in OpenSSL/Firefox/ 
> Internet Explorer. Is that because ECC certificates aren't available  
> from the popular Certificate Authorities? This should be less of an  
> issue in an embedded/closed environment where one could use their own  
> CA/cert.

If certs are an issue and active attackers are not an issue then you
could always use ECDHE_RSA with the smallish RSA keys you have already.