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kwantam / draft-wahby-cfrg-hpke-kem-secp256k1

secp256k1 KEM definition for HPKE
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Why let this expire? #2

Open DanGould opened 3 months ago

DanGould commented 3 months ago

Hi @kwantam,

This draft is useful for implementing Hybrid Public Key Encryption and Oblivious HTTP in the context of Bitcoin Core and other bitcoin applications where TLS and cryptographic curves beyond secp256k1 are unavailable, but SHA-256 and ChaChaPoly1305 are.

I see this draft expired. I'm a newbie when it comes to IETF process. Could you let me know why this expired or if there was a discussion anywhere? I'm willing to open it back up but figured I should seek some more information first in case I'm going down a path where a decision was already made. I checked the cfrg mailing list but found no mention of this draft.

kwantam commented 3 months ago

Expiration just means "this hasn't seen any activity in 6 months". It's more about housekeeping than anything else. I have to update the draft to include the newly allocated codepoint for secp256k1 (which will un-expire it). But in any case, IANA has allocated a codepoint for dhkem+secp256k1 (in "non-compact" mode---I've had a request to define for compact mode too, so I'll try to do that as well).

But the upshot is: "expired" here doesn't mean "don't use this".