JEP for X25519/X448 key agreement (original) (raw)

Adam Petcher adam.petcher at oracle.com
Thu Sep 21 15:25:50 UTC 2017

I would like to leave this open for feedback for another week or so. Please reply with your comments by Saturday, September 30, end of day, anywhere on earth. After that time, I plan to move on to the next phase of the process (group lead and architect review prior to submission).

On 9/14/2017 12:59 PM, Adam Petcher wrote:

The JEP for X25519/X448 key agreement[1] is now available and ready to review. Please take a look and reply with any feedback you have.

The JEP contains a description of the proposed JCA API. We have discussed the API on this mailing list, and I have attempted to incorporate all the feedback I have received. Here is a description of the changes since the last discussion: 1) Multiple people requested more specific types for public/private keys for this algorithm. The latest API design mirrors the "EC" hierarchy and has both interfaces and spec classes for public and private keys. I also added the interface "XDHKey", which serves the same purpose as "ECKey". 2) The representation of public keys was changed from byte[] to a BigInteger which holds the u coordinate of the point. Private keys are still represented using byte[] due to complications related to pruning, and also because BigInteger doesn't provide a branch-free way to get the key into another representation (which is necessary for side-channel-resilient implementations). The proposed API still lacks a standard way to specify arbitrary domain parameters, but I believe the API design could be extended to support this feature. I would prefer to add this API as a separate enhancement in the future, preferably in cooperation with someone who is developing a provider that supports this feature.

[1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8181595

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