On 12/15/11 11:51 AM, ext Brian LaMacchia wrote:
Hello all,
Sorry for coming to this thread late (I'm on vacation) but I want to comment on
a number of points raised during this thread:
1) Concerning the suggestion to move ECDSA out of XMLDSIG 1.1, that suggestion
is a non-starter for XMLDSIG. One of the main motivations for XMLDSIG 1.1 is
to update the spec to support Suite B cryptography, and that means ECDSA
support has to be there. Delaying ECC is not a viable option for XMLDSIG.
And further delaying widgets-digsig while waiting for money to fall from
the sky doesn't seem like a particularly viable option either.
(I don't understand the violent opposition for an additional version of
XMLSig that includes everything in XMLSig1.1 CR minus the ECC refs nor
why the specs aren't crafted such that the syntax and algorithms are in
separate specs.)
2) I do not understand the comments that Widget-DSig is independent of ECC. As far as I
can tell from reading the spec, while Widget-Dsig makes certain recommendations about
algorithms and key sizes legally Widget-DSig has to work with any XMLDSIG 1.1
mandatory-to-implement option. That is, Widget-DSig does not *profile* XMLDSIG 1.1 but
simply says "use XMLDSIG 1.1". Since ECDSA-SHA256 is a mandatory-to-implement
signature algorithm in XMLDSIG 1.1, every Widget-DSig implementation would have to
support it (it would be violating the XMLDSIG 1.1 spec otherwise).
One view here is that ECC is XMLSig's direct problem. XMLSig should be
responsible for testing ECC - not widgets-digsig. An analogy is HTML5
and CSS2.1: HTML5 normatively references CSS2.1 but there is no
expectation the HTML5's test suite will test every assertion in CSS2.1.
I think this applies with widgets-digsig and XMLSig and in this view,
they are "independent".
-AB
