Re: [TLS] AES-OCB in TLS [New Version Notification for draft-zauner-tls-aes-ocb-03.txt]

[Michael Hamburg <[e-mail]>]

> On Jun 1, 2015, at 10:28 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Mon 2015-06-01 08:37:16 -0400, Aaron Zauner wrote:
>> Firstly, as far as I know it's also quite difficult to get ECDSA
>> certificates in the wild. Has this changed significantly over the past
>> couple of months?
> 
> I've heard this claim in the past, but i'm not sure what it is based on.
> AFAICT, there are several public CAs who are happy to issue ECDSA
> certificates if you ask them for them.
> 
> In November 2014, i managed to get one from Comodo (or a Comodo
> reseller, i can't keep all the "imprints" and "branding" straight) and
> it took about 20 minutes from start to finish.
> 
> Can you describe how you have tried to get an ECDSA cert, and how those
> attempts failed?
> 
>             --dkg


I tried to get one from Comodo about a year ago.  It wasn’t advertised on their website but I asked one of their tech support folks.  They said that it was an experimental feature for business customers only, and would cost me something like $600.  I don’t remember if that was a 1-year or 3-year cert.

I looked at Verisign’s catalog as well, and it was labeled as an enterprise feature with an even higher price tag.  Low thousands I think.  I asked the guys at BaySec and they said that this was the shape of the market at that time.

I also looked at StartSSL.  They are free, but only offer RSA certs.  I mostly wanted ECDSA for performance on a super slow home server, and I figured $600 in hardware upgrades would go a lot further than $600 in certs.

Anyway you can get ECDSA certs relatively easily, but not cheaply; or at least, that’s how it was a year ago.

— Mike