ECC and smartcards

[Werner Koch]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2013 07:27, gniibe at fsij.org said:

> Since then, I did some part of ECDSA in GnuPG 2.1.x.  I tested it with
> Gnuk development version for authentication.

I have more and more doubts that using ECDSA by default in GnuPG is the
Right Thing.  Although I don't think that the NIST curves have been
selected for possible future algorithm break or a chance for broken
implementations, we can't be sure about it and many people will probably
not trust them for non-technical reasons.  Thus a released 2.1.0 will
likely use Bernstein et al.'s curves by default.

Given that it is unlikely that we will find an implementation of
Curve25519 in a proprietary smartcard any time soon, I am bit lost on
what do do with ECC and smartcards.  Given that Gnuk would actually
benefit from a fast software implementable curve, it might be a good
idea to take the first step and do just that.  Ed22519 is now
implemented in Libgcrypt and a next step could be to squeeze it into the
RFC-6637 format (using non-compressed points) and make it the default
ECC signing algorithm.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

-- 
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