On Feb 20, 2014, at 12:19 PM, Samuel Neves <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 02-02-2014 21:52, Michael Hamburg wrote:
>> I was referring to the Weierstrass form with this comment, not the prime 
>> shape.  I agree with Robert and Watson from a few posts ago (and, it seems, 
>> with you) that it’s dangerous to try to reuse Weierstrass implementations 
>> with new curves, because they’ll have the problems of the old ones 
>> (incomplete formulas) and the new (cofactors), and possibly worse ones from 
>> the combination (cofactors leading to corner cases).
> 
> The recent report by Bos et al [1] might be helpful here to get actual
> drop-in replacements to the NIST curves. The reported speeds of the
> proposed Weierstrass curves are not so bad in comparison with Edwards,
> although those cycle counts are still rather high compared to the
> current state of the art.
> 
> [1] https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=209303

That’s a neat report.  I look forward to seeing their source code.  Their 
timings look competitive, especially for the 384-bit curves.

I’m a little bit surprised that their variable-base Edwards implementation is 
so much faster than the Montgomery ladder.  It helps that they aren’t 
compressing points, but I would still expect it to be closer.  $w$=7 also seems 
pretty large, and I wonder how they’re handling constant-time lookups into a 
table that size.

I’m pretty sure they’d get significantly better numbers for fixed-base with a 
signed-all-bits-set comb.

It’s not clear whether drop-in replacements are desirable, but these seems like 
good options if we want to go that route.

Cheers,
— Mike
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