Re: Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange draft

[Damien Miller <djm%mindrot.org@localhost>]

Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> [wearing my WG chair hat.]
> Doug:
> 
> There is an old story about how penguins decide it's safe to go
> swimming.  A large crowd of them mill about near the edge of the ice,
> jostling each other until finally one of them falls in.  The remaining
> ones then see if the first bird gets eaten by a shark -- if not, the
> rest jump in..
> 
> With ECC, we're in the milling-about stage.  Sharks have been sighted,
> though not very recently.  But the penguins are still nervous and
> really would prefer that someone else go first....
> 
> This WG has limited time and energy.  For this to be adopted as a WG
> item I'll need to hear from a community of implementors interested in
> adopting it.
> 
> When possible, this WG (like much of the IETF as a whole) has
> traditionally preferred functionaly equivalent unencumbered technology
> even when it has lower performance (see DSS vs RSA).
> 
> The message I'm getting from WG members who have spoken up thus far is
> that the uncertainties regarding the ECC IPR situation make it
> uninteresting to them.

OpenSSH has no desire to implement anything tainted by patents and we
strongly oppose any efforts to standardise encumbered methods in
IETF-published standards.

That goes for "free to use with strings attached" patent licenses too,
such as the code that Sun contributed to OpenSSL.

-d