[p2p-hackers] Distributed identity, chat, publishing, and sharing

[Sean Lynch]

ianG <iang at iang.org> writes:

> BTW, why the keenness on Ed25519?

Sorry for the delayed response. I managed to lose track of this message
migrating between Gmail and my own server.

I like Ed25519 because the public keys are 255 bits long, which makes
them potentially usable directly as identifiers. However, more recent
events have changed my thinking on this. Schneier speculates that one of
the NSA's breakthroughs the Snowden documents talks about may be an
advance in the cryptanalysis of ECC systems, and he recommends sticking
with better-studied, more conventional systems based on the conventional
discrete logarithm problem.

On top of that, given the dynamic nature of cryptographic technology,
it's probably not a good idea to lock oneself into a particular
cryptosystem or hash scheme or even to require that identifiers be keys
themselves. An identifier scheme could support Ed25519 as one
particularly convenient key type, but eventually we'll want to support
fingerprints as identifiers and fetching of public keys from a DHT.

--
Sean Lynch <seanl at literati.org>
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