[tahoe-dev] change of priorities for v1.5: ECDSA

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Folks:

I spoke with Brian today, and offered to prioritize ECDSA in  
pycryptopp over other things, and he responded very positively to  
that.  He has been blocked for... let's see... more than a year on me  
adding good ECDSA into pycryptopp so that we can implement a whole  
bunch of secure, decentralized, efficient features such as digitally  
signed announcements for decentralized and extensible introduction,  
small fast mutable file and dir caps, decentralized accounting, and  
so on.

Now, strategically, one of the most important factors influencing the  
growth and development of Tahoe is how motivated Brian is to work on it.

Accordingly, I'm changing my priorities for the v1.5 release (which  
is still expected in June).  I'm going to spend most of my  
(increasingly limited) time working on ECDSA for pycryptopp, which  
means I wouldn't be surprised if the other goals for v1.5 such as  
handling of ill-encoded filenames on Linux or adding support for  
deploying on embedded systems such as NAS boxes aren't finished in  
time for the June release.

Obviously, if someone else starts spending more time working on those  
features then that increases the chance that they will be ready for  
v1.5.

By the way, the encoding issues remain so deeply perplexing, even  
after such intense study, that I'm increasingly interested in  
something that François proposed a while back: implement the easy  
parts first!  In particular, I would like to carefully review the  
extensive alternatives proposed so far with an eye to "What can we do  
in v1.5 which will at least not preclude us from implementing one of  
these improvements in v1.6, and especially which will not obligate us  
to maintain compatibility with a design that we may later regret.".

For example, putting the flat binary contents of filenames into the  
Tahoe metadata when copying from local system into Tahoe doesn't  
hurt.  *Using* those binary filenames for anything when copying from  
Tahoe into local system might.  ;-)  More on that later.

Regards,

Zooko

tickets alluded to in this message:

http://allmydata.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/3 # serialize ecdsa keys  
without the fluff
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/331 #comment:12 # add DSA to  
pycryptopp - serialize pubkeys with less fluff
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/466 # extendable Introducer  
protocol: dictionary-based, signed announcements
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/217 # DSA-based mutable files  
-- small URLs, fast file creation
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/295 # distributed  
introduction: robust, gossip-based
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/467 # change peer-selection to  
allow introducerless explicit serverlist, alternative backends
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/68 # implement distributed  
introduction, remove Introducer as a single point of failure