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Re: [TLS] draft-ietf-tls-curve25519-01 and the X25519 significant bit.

Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> Tue, 12 January 2016 14:24 UTC

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From: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
To: Adam Langley <agl@imperialviolet.org>
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Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:24:32 +0100
In-Reply-To: <CAMfhd9XDfwmoze+BdFVedhCGDQRNbL63ZT=KZc-7dEr0UMk4dA@mail.gmail.com> (Adam Langley's message of "Tue, 22 Dec 2015 10:52:28 -0800")
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Subject: Re: [TLS] draft-ietf-tls-curve25519-01 and the X25519 significant bit.
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Adam Langley <agl@imperialviolet.org> writes:

> Curve25519, as the name suggests, operates on 255-bit numbers. When
> encoded as bytes, there's obviously a 256th bit that needs to be
> specified.
>
> Curve25519 implementations didn't set the bit but did used to vary on
> how they parsed it. Some would take a 256-bit number and reduce it
> while others would ignore the bit completely.
>
> However, I believe that implementations have converged on ignoring it.
> That behaviour is specified in draft-irtf-cfrg-curves and tested via
> the test vectors.
>
> Currently https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-curve25519-01#section-2.3
> says that implementations SHOULD reject inputs with the high-bit set.
> I think that should be dropped. The X25519 function is specified in
> terms of bytes in draft-irtf-cfrg-curves and I think the TLS spec
> should just use that draft.

I agree.

/Simon

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