[tahoe-dev] Fwd: ECDSA question

[zooko]

Brian asked me to forward this to tahoe-dev:

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Brian Warner <warner at lothar.com>
> Date: March 8, 2008 1:46:19 AM MST
> To: Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com>
> Subject: ECDSA question
>
> Hey, I had another question about EC-DSA. Is the private key just an
> unstructured random number, as it is with DL-DSA? Or does it have to
> have some special properties? I noticed the key-generation API took a
> seed argument, but it wasn't immediately obvious to me whether there
> was also some entropy involved.
>
> I haven't found a use for it yet, but I was pleased by the idea that
> our write-cap could conceivably be generated by hashing some stronger
> cap, so I was wondering if we would lose this property by moving to
> EC-DSA. Maybe.. maybe an append-only data structure could have one
> signing key for arbitrary writes, and a weaker signing key for  
> appends,
> and then the append-cap could be derived from the write-cap. (the
> servers would have to be configured to accept append-key-signed
> messages and bundle them together, then when the original client came
> back, it could use the write-key to replace the bundle of append
> messages with a single new version).
>
> Oh, and if you haven't performed those crypto++-vN tests on the gutsy
> buildslave (aka tahoecs2) by the time I get back on monday, I'll give
> them a try.
>
> cheers,
>  -Brian