Subject: Document Action: 'Fundamental Elliptic Curve Cryptography Algorithms' to Informational RFC (draft-mcgrew-fundamental-ecc-04.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:35:44 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Fundamental Elliptic Curve Cryptography Algorithms'
  (draft-mcgrew-fundamental-ecc-04.txt) as an Informational RFC

This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an
IETF Working Group.

The IESG contact person is Tim Polk.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcgrew-fundamental-ecc/

Technical Summary

This note describes the fundamental algorithms of Elliptic Curve
Cryptography (ECC) as they are defined in some early references.
These descriptions may be useful for implementing the fundamental
algorithms without using any of the specialized methods that were
developed in following years.  Only elliptic curves defined over
fields of characteristic greater than three are in scope; these curves
are those used in Suite B.

Working Group Summary

This document is not the product of any working group.  The document
was presented in the SAAG meeting at IETF 77, where it received
several positive comments and no negative ones.  Detailed and
substantial reviews have been performed, including ones by
mathematicians and implementers.  All important feedback has been
addressed and suggested additions have been incorporated.

This draft was reviewed and discussed in the IRTF Crypto Forum
Research Group.  Many reviewers expressed interest in the work.  A
number of reviewers suggested that the notation or algorithms of the
draft should be changed to promote consistency between its different
sections.  However, this was not done because this suggestion is
inconsistent with the goal of closely following the original
references, which is a primary objective.  To address the need for
consistency, several subsections and appendicies were added that
describe the correspondence between the notations and algorithms.

Note that Certicom has filed two IPR notices on this specification after
the beginning of IETF Last Call.

Document Quality 

Representatives from a number of vendors have expressed an interest in
the draft.  The contributions of Howard Pinder, Andrey Jivsov, Alfred
Hoenes, and Dan Harkins have been acknowledged.  Some other reviewers
have declined to be recognized.

Personnel

Tim Polk is both shepherd and Area Director.