ECC and smartcards

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 09:50:34AM +0100, Werner Koch wrote:
> On Mon,  9 Jan 2012 09:42, achim at pietig.com said:
> 
> > Main problem at the moment is that the OpenPGP white paper for ECC is basing on NIST curves.
> > All available cards in Europe (my test samples etc.) support Brainpool only, because Brainpool
> 
> Actually this is not a problem.  ECC for OpenPGP allows the use of
> arbitrary curves.  Libgcrypt support the relevant Brainpool curves.  It
> is just a matter of UI design in GPG to select a curve.

The current RFC draft (you are probably aware of it) only specifies
OIDs for NIST curves and mandates support for NIST P-256 [1]. Though
it might be possible to support other curves, it seems likely that
(at least) P-256 will be the best choice for interoperability.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jivsov-openpgp-ecc-08