[openssl-dev] ECDH engine

[Alexander Gostrer]

Hi Uri,

The ATECC508A is a chip. There are few USB devices built by Atmel on its base. Or you can use the chip directly over I2C (that many people like to do). You can follow the links that we posted on the ATECCX08 Engine repository WiKi to learn about the chip. 
Well, our first indent was to use the pksc11 library. But it didn't go to well for many reasons. I should go back for several months to collect these reasons but I think the main reason was that ATECC508A hardware is based on ECC-256 algorithms while pkcs11 is originally written for RSA - the overhead was looking too high (many ATECC508 customers are using limited hardware and want direct I2C connection to the chip). 
But let's talk about pkcs11. Can you point me to the set of documentation for EC-DERIVE? It may be a good time now to add the ATECC508 support to there.

Regards,
Alex 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 20, 2016, at 8:11 AM, Blumenthal, Uri - 0553 - MITLL <uri at ll.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> What is this Atmel x508x? Is it a chip? Is it a token/smartcard? Is it accessible via PKCS#11 at all? Is it accessible by/via OpenSC?
> 
> I am trying to figure why such a generic and useful set of ECC operations (Sign, Derive) is implementation-limited to one single <whatever>. 
> 
> A much better solution to me would be adding EC-DERIVE to engine_pkcs11, and automatically get all the tokens covered.
> 
> Since I'm probably‎ missing something, could you please educate me?
> 
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network.
> From: Alexander Gostrer‎
> Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2016 10:47
> To: Dr. Stephen Henson
> Reply To: openssl-dev at openssl.org
> Cc: openssl-dev at openssl.org
> Subject: Re: [openssl-dev] ECDH engine
> ‎
> Hi Steve,
> ‎
> And here is the ENGINE implementation for Atmel ATECC508A with few small patches to OpenSSL_1_0_2-stable:
> https://github.com/AtmelCSO/cryptoauth-openssl-engine
> 
> Your comments are welcome.
> 
> Regards,
> Alex.
> 
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 12:49 PM, Dr. Stephen Henson <steve at openssl.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015, Alexander Gostrer wrote:
>> 
>> > Hi Steve,
>> >
>> > John and I completed writing an ECDH engine based on the
>> > OpenSSL_1_0_2-stable branch. We were planning to expand it to the master
>> > but found some major changes made by you recently. What is the status of
>> > this task? Is it stable enough to follow it? Are you planning another
>> > changes? Is there a design document that we can use in our work?
>> >
>> 
>> The version in master shouldn't change much any more. Documentation will be
>> available in the near future. The changes were meant to remove some of the
>> weird "quirks" of ECC compared to other algortihms and to permit future
>> expansion to a wider range of curves.
>> 
>> In the meantime it shouldn't be too hard to follow how the new code works.
>> Instead of separate ECDH/ECDSA methods with weird locking and ex_data and
>> minimal ENGINE support everything is combined into a single EC_KEY_METHOD
>> which can contain ECDSA, ECDH and key generation (something which was
>> impossible with the old code) and be tied directly to an ENGINE.
>> 
>> Most of the primary APIs such as ECDH_compute_key can be redirected directly
>> through an engine supplied function in EC_KEY_METHOD.
>> 
>> Having said that the code is very new and may have the odd bug that needs to
>> be fixed. If you have any problems let me know and I'll look into them.
>> 
>> Steve.
>> --
>> Dr Stephen N. Henson. OpenSSL project core developer.
>> Commercial tech support now available see: http://www.openssl.org
> 
> 
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