Re: SSH in ECC Internet Draft

[Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld%sun.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 11:17 -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 01:52:24AM +1000, Damien Miller wrote:
> > IMO that (some) ECC libraries happen to use ASN.1 is not a good reason
> > to use it as protocol element.
> 
> The draft defines one ASN.1 type ('curves', a SEQUENCE of OIDs) where
> existing SSHv2 constructs could be used instead.  The draft's other uses
> of ASN.1/DER do not require an implementation of SSHv2 to implement
> ASN.1/DER outside ECC libraries, but this one type does.

actually, it looks to me like there may be a deeper problem: the same
"two level negotiation" issue which affected the gssapi key exchange.

I think you need to define a family of ssh key exchanges, one per
defined "curve", so that two implementations which support
noninteresecting sets of ECC curves but also support other KEX
mechanisms can find other common mechanisms.

							- Bill