Re: [TLS] -draft8447bis: rename Support Group Elliptic curve groups space

[Bob Beck <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2024 at 2:59 AM David Benjamin <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Regarding renaming, I'm torn. "Group" was a truly horrible rename. The names we pick make their way into APIs and even sometimes UI surfaces for developers. Every time I've plumbed TLS named groups into another system, I've been met with confusion about what in the world a "group" is, and I've had to embarrassingly explain that yes, it is a term of art, short for "Diffie-Hellman group", no, it doesn't even make sense with PQC, and I'm truly very sorry that TLS chose such a needlessly confusing name, but it's the name we've got. Sometimes I just give up on the TLSWG's naming and just saying "key exchange" or "key agreement", but that gets a little tricky because that can also mean the left half of a TLS 1.2 cipher suite (ECDHE_RSA / ECDHE_ECDSA / RSA). At one point, we tried "key exchange group" to avoid that, but that's also problematic as one needs to explain to translators that this does not mean "primary trade collection".
>
> This name is bad enough that I needed to make a pre-written explanation for this, so I can save time and link to it every time it comes up.
>
> At the same time, we've already renamed this once. These names we pick make their way everywhere, each rename we do is costly. All the old "curve" APIs had to be doubled up and deprecated in systems, with the old ones forever stuck around. And then some systems (probably correctly) decided to stick with the old "curve" name. Renaming again will add a third, and repeat this costly cycle.

This would be why in spite of the fact that I dislike the "group"
name, I would lean more to the "no do not rename" - We already deal
with "group" and "curve" for this and the names are scattered through
API and implementations, and we already have to deal with explaining
it's not really a group, and not really a curve, and it was renamed.
IMO Renaming this a third time will simply add more such confusion to
this area and make the "explaining" david alludes to above even longer
to add a third case to make people aware of the rough equivalency of
the third name in the saga, since the old names will not go away soon
or easily.

> Had we not renamed, I would say we just keep it at "curves". While "curves" is also wrong for PQC, it is less generic of a name than "group" and, in my experience, reads more clearly as a random term of art. It's a pity that we then changed it to one of the most overloaded words in English imaginable. :-(