Informal minutes of the IEEE P1363 Editorial Teleconference
Monday, April 13, 1998, 10am Pacific Daylight Time

Present:

Lily Chen
Don Johnson
Burt Kaliski
David Kravitz
Mike Markowitz
Brian Romansky
Roger Schlafly
Ari Singer
Tim Skorick
Jerry Solinas
Yiqun Lisa Yin
Leo Reyzin
Robert Zuccherato

1) Burt reviewed the progress since the March meeting.

a) Annex A (Number-Theoretic Background).  Jerry and Leo had worked on it
and a new version had been posted to the web site on April 6.  Jerry said
that the Annex was more or less in final form; there had been some
corrections made, but there was no new material except the point
compaction method for EC points.  The point compaction method is different
from point compression in that, in addition to compressing the
y-coordinate down to one bit (as is done in point compression), it also
gets rid of one bit of the x-coordinate.  The point compaction method, in
addition to point compression, will be used for data formats in Annex G.

b) Annex B (Conformance).  Burt said that he had made no changes to the
Annex itself, but instead had been working a lot on confomance-related
material in the main body.  He expected to post a version to the web site
within a few weeks.

c) Annex D (Security Considerations).  Burt and Lisa had worked on it and
produced a new version that had been posted to the web site on April 6. 
The outline was there, but a lot of the details still needed to be filled
in.  Burt said that supporting notes, such as rationale for our choices,
would be added in the next installment. 

d) Lisa had made some changes to the main body, besides
conformance-related material.  The latest version had been posted to the
web site on April 6.  She said that the changes reflected the decisions of
the March meeting and other, mostly minor, comments received.  All the
changes were editorial.  Burt had made many conformance-related changes,
and had also implemented the working group's decisions on cofactor
multiplication versions of the DH primitives (the "DHC primitives").

e) Burt said that he had not yet issued a call for submissions on P1363a. 
Instead, he had been spending time on patent-related issues, which seemed
more urgent for completion of P1363. Burt and Leo added patent
information, including some responses to the patent solicitation letter,
to the P1363 web site. 

2) Burt asked for comments on the latest version of Annex D (Security
Considerations).  Don said that he liked the approach.  He pointed out,
and we agreed, that we should clearly state in the Annex what point in
time our knowledge base is up to. 

As there were no more general comments, Burt asked that techincal
comments be posted to the mailing list.

3)  We discussed plans for further work.  Items that we were hoping
to produce by May 11 (8 days before the next teleconference on May 19):

a)  Annex A (Number-Theoretic Background).  Tables to be inserted and
possibly minor edits. (Jerry, Leo)

b)  Annex C (Rationale).  Lisa said that the current version had
all the questions and maybe about half the answers.  It seemed that we
could have most of it done by May 11.  It was agreed that some
disucussion on the mailing list may be helpful to come up with some of 
the answers.

c)  Annex D (Security Considerations). A more final draft to be
produced. (Burt, Lisa)

d)  Annex G (Data Formats).  Mike Markowitz said he had found an old draft
of a P1363 section on ASN.1 syntax and was hoping to borrow from it.  A
lot could be borrowed from the ANSI X9 standards.  Don asked if Phil
Griffin could participate and Burt asked that the draft of the Annex be
circulated to Phil.  Don asked that we have our own identifier tree, and
we agreed that we needed to work with IEEE on that. 

e)  Annex H (Bibliogrpahy).  Leo said that it would be best to wait for
everything else to get stabilized, because there was no point in editing
the bibliography earlier.  Don pointed out that it could be helpful to
separate published and unpublished (such as web pages and personal
communication)  references. We decided to try to find published
substitutes for unpublished references whenever possible. 

f)  Main body edits.  Burt said that he was considering reorganizing the
schemes in the body by scheme type (key agreement, signature, encryption)
and adding more information on scheme conformance. 

4) Burt asked that people review sections that are in near-final form,
such as Annex A.  It seemed that we were on track with the schedule
established at the March meeting.

We adjourned at 10:35am Pacific Daylight Time.