Elliptic Curve Extensibility - your view is expected

Dear all,
Thanks helping the editors by making sure you agree with his proposal…
Regards,
Virginie

From: Mark Watson [mailto:watsonm@netflix.com]
Sent: jeudi 16 octobre 2014 00:52
To: public-webcrypto@w3.org
Subject: Elliptic Curve Extensibility

All,

According to the status on Bug 25618, I am working on proposed revisions to specify extensibility for import / export more explicitly in terms of the enum / string / OID values specified in the main spec, extension specs or unrecognized (as per Richard's generic proposal).

So, it would not be possible for extension specifications to completely override the import / export procedures as per my original proposal.

In the case of elliptic curves, this has some consequences. I would like to know if the group is ok with these:

(1) For SPKI and PKCS8 import / export the curve must be identified entirely and only by the namedCurve choice of the parameters field of the algorithm field of algorithm field of the SPKI
(2) for SPKI import, the EC public key can be identified by the "conversion steps defined in Section 2.2 of RFC 5480"
(3) for PKCS8 import, the EC private key can be identified by the "conversion steps defined in Section 3 of RFC 5915"
(4) for JWK import, the EC public key can be identified by "interpreting jwk according to Section 6.2.2 of JSON Web Algorithms"
(5) for JWK import, the EC private key can be identified by "interpreting jwk according to Section 6.2.1 of JSON Web Algorithms"
(6) for SPKI export, the EC public key has a defined representation as an octet string
(7) for PKCS8 export, the key has a defined representation as "an instance of the ECPrivateKey structure defined in Section 3 of RFC 5915"
(8) for JWK export, the EC public key has a representation as "x" and "y" values according to Sections 6.2.1.2 and 6.1.2.3 of JWA, respectively and the EC private key has a representatopm as a "d" value according to 6.2.2.1 of JWA

If any of these things are not true for some potential future named curve then the curve could only be added to the existing ECDSA and ECDH algorithms if the key format concerned is not supported. Otherwise, the curve would have to be added as a new algorithm instead.

Alternatively, we can punt much more of the definition of EC import / export for "extension" values of namedCurve to the extension specifications, but this involves a much bigger text change.

Please let me know your opinions.

...Mark


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