Subject: Usefulness of ECC-DSA algorithm for DNSSEC

From: Thierry Moreau <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 23:57:04 -0500

Dear Ólafur:

In a different forum, you asked for guidance on using ECC-DSA for 
DNSSEC. See http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg01170.html

The single benefit from the ECC-DSA would be smaller signature size than 
with RSA.

However, the RSA-SHA1 RRSIGs would still be mandatory in DNSSEC replies 
in any event, since RSA-SHA1 is mandatory-to-implement. Thus, the 
addition of small signature with the ECC-DSA algorithm can only ENLARGE 
responses from security-aware nameservers. Please correct me if I'm 
mis-reading the DNSSEC spec, e.g. if an island of security may exist 
without support for RSA-SHA1 and still be compliant with RFC4033/4/5.

So, either there is no benefit in adding well-defined ECC-DSA to the 
mandatory-to-implement and you should abandon the idea, or you are 
investigating a move from RSA-SHA1 to ECC-DSA-SHA2 (instead of RSA-SHA2).

Thanks in advance for your clarifications.

Regards,

-- 

- Thierry Moreau

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