[openssl-dev] OpenSSL offers reviewers for draft-saarinen-blake2

[Yoav Nir]

> On Jun 13, 2015, at 4:12 PM, Salz, Rich <rsalz at akamai.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Recently the OpenSSL development community has expressed renewed
>> interest in having the document finalized as an RFC and they seem to
>> consider this to be a prerequisite of BLAKE2's adoption into the main branch
>> of OpenSSL
> 
> This is not true.  The topic of RFC-or-not has never come up in any OpenSSL discussions that I have seen.

Except the previous thread.

An RFC is not needed to get an algorithm into OpenSSL. It *is* necessary if we want ciphersuites for TLS, signature hashes for certificates PRFs and MACs for IKE/IPsec etc.

None of the bodies standardizing those will go with an algorithms whose sole specifications are a website maintained by the people who invented the algorithm and a wikipedia article. That’s where an RFC can help, just like RFC 7539 was needed to get ChaCha20-Poly1305 into TLS and IPsecME drafts. With a good RFC we can push TLS, IPsecME, and PKIX drafts, perhaps even get some interest from CAs in the CA/BF.

With Blake2 getting no use at all in browsers, web servers, VPN gateways and certificates, I don’t even know what "BLAKE2 is a de facto industry standard hash function” means.

Yoav