Subject: Re: [saag] Time now for ECC?

From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 01:07:35 +0000

Stephen Kent <[email-masked]> writes:

>Another issue to consider is hardware support. While SW support may not be
>terribly hard to generalize, HW support may be more curve (family)-specific.
>Folks operating servers, who make use of hardware acceleration, would be
>adversely affected if we encourage use of curve families that are not
>supported.  I suggest we try to get input from folks to gauge the
>availability of HW support for ECDH.

In PKCS #11, hardware support even for the NIST curves is barely there (the
number of bugs I've found in the few devices that support ECC would indicate
that even fewer apps ever bother using it).  So the good news is that the
delta between functioning support for NIST curves and support for random-
exotic-curve is very small, i.e. it's not that big a leap.  The bad news is
that functioning support of any kind is only slightly larger.

Peter.

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From: Stephen Kent <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 01:42:17 -0400

Peter,

Crypto accelerates for web sites may not require PKCS-11 compatibility,
and that's the hardware to which I tried to allude. Users can employ SW, 
as usual.

Steve