[Cryptography] IETF discussion on new ECC curves.

[Stephen Farrell]

Two wee comments...

On 08/08/14 17:28, ianG wrote:

> Why do we pander to these organisations?  People quote Russian and 
> Chinese ciphers, but I don't see why we should inflict the choice on
> the rest of the net just because some organisation thinks they'd like
> to push an agenda.
> 
> It seems to be a logical absurdity.  NIST has a standards suite that 
> people think highly of.  So we have to accept NIST.
> 
> So, if we accept NIST, we now must let the Russians GOSTs in.  And
> the Chinese.  ... We're back then at the same place of vanity
> ciphers, 'cept on a national level.  Absurd.

Well yes and no, but mostly yes. Purely personally I figure that's
becuase NIST did such a good job with AES that we figured that
suite B would be fine. The "no" part is that unfortunately once
we'd gone there, and NIST do turn out to be a .gov, that did make
it impractical to easily say no to other .gov.ccTLD types. Somewhat
absurd though, no question.

...

> If say IETF committees 

Sigh. Ian - you have participated on a few IETF mailing lists
recently. Are you a part of this cabal of committees now? I'm
guessing you would reasonably say no. And the reason is not that
you're special, but rather that there is no cabal of committees.
That's just not how it works and continuing to describe the IETF
thusly seems to me to lack... style. Well accuracy at least.

That might seem a bit precious, but the fact is that this mailing
list is as likely to conclude something crazy as any other,
whether hosted by Perry or the IETF. Using the pejorative
"committee" is just basically careless. The IETF is made up of
mailing lists with participants who are people (well, almost
all;-) with all their foibles and imperfections, same as here.

Cheers,
S.