Re: Prime example of a can of worms

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg () fifthhorseman net>]

On Thu 2015-10-22 01:09:16 -0400, Kurt Seifried wrote:
> Having a large pool of known good primes would be easier for them to use I
> suspect. Sadly we can't let perfect be the enemy of the good, or in this
> case the "not completely terrible".

a large pool of known-good primes doesn't help so much, particularly for
the embedded case -- peers that are offered a group need to be able to
easily verify that the group is strong.  embedded devices simply aren't
going to carry around a large list of well-vetted primes of short
length, but we could *maybe* convince them to carry around a shorter
list of well-vetted strong primes.

I'd rather see us increase the security margin for a set of well-vetted
standard groups than ask people to make implementations that can't
determine whether they're in a reasonable group or not.

     --dkg