There are at least three clear benefits:

1. Compatibility with binary elliptic curves (e.g., the B-XXX curves in
FIPS 186)

2. Simplified compatibility with crypto libraries (as noted in the issue)

3. Space savings via compressed format



On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Brian Campbell
<[email protected]>wrote:

> -1
>
> Ad-hoc as it might be, the current format is pretty simple and has
> been working rather well for a good while now.
>
> This would be a breaking change with no clear benefit.
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 4:54 PM, jose issue tracker
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > #53: Use "SEC1" format for elliptic curve keys
> >
> >  The "SEC1" format for elliptic curve points is used as the format for EC
> >  public keys in CMS, X.509, TLS, etc.  As a result, it enjoys widespread
> >  library support.
> >
> >  * OpenSSL: "Note OpenSSL uses the private key format specified in 'SEC
> 1:
> >  Elliptic Curve Cryptography' (http://www.secg.org/)."
> >  * BouncyCastle: "[As of 2.39.3] EC Public/Private keys are now encoded
> in
> >  accordance with SEC 1."
> >  * CNG: CryptImportPublicKeyInfo uses SubjectPublicKeyInfo, which uses
> SEC1
> >  * PKCS#11: Uses IEEE P1363, which is the same as SEC1
> >
> >  So rather than specifying an ad-hoc point format, we should re-use that
> >  format.  We could do this directly (by just having a binary field with
> the
> >  SEC1 encoding), or take the X and Y values defined in SEC1 and express
> >  them separately.
> >
> > --
> >
> -------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
> >  Reporter:  [email protected]   |      Owner:  draft-ietf-jose-json-web-
> >      Type:  defect       |  [email protected]
> >  Priority:  major        |     Status:  new
> > Component:  json-web-    |  Milestone:
> >   algorithms             |    Version:
> >  Severity:  -            |   Keywords:
> >
> -------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Ticket URL: <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/jose/trac/ticket/53>
> > jose <http://tools.ietf.org/jose/>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > jose mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jose
>
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