Informal minutes of the IEEE P1363 Editorial Teleconference
Tuesday, May 19, 1998, 10am Pacific Daylight Time

Present:

Lily Chen
Phillip Griffin
Don Johnson
Burt Kaliski
David Kravitz
Mike Markowitz
Roger Schlafly
Tim Skorick
Jerry Solinas
Yiqun Lisa Yin
Leo Reyzin
Robert Zuccherato

1) We reviewed the editorial progress since the last teleconference.

a) Lisa went over the main body changes.  She said they were mostly
editorial and conformance-related.  Don mentioned that X9.42 had changed
their key derivation function and asked if we wanted to follow their
change.  Burt pointed out that the changes concerned the format of
additional key derivation parameters, which we left completely open.  Don
suggested that it is an important security consideration: that both
parties agree unambiguously on the format of these parameters.

b) Jerry and Leo were working on the final touches to Annex A
(Number-Theoretic Background) and were adding tables for factorization of
2^m-1 and for trinomial, pentanomial and Gaussian normal bases for
GF(2^m).  They had not posted a new version for this teleconference, but
expected to post it before the June meeting.

c)  Burt had posted another version of Annex B (Conformance), following
through on the decisions of the March meeting regarding conformance with
primitives. He also reorganized the annex outline. He expected to make
more annex changes for schemes; some of this may have an impact on the
main body, in terms of the precise definition of a scheme, which he would
send to the mailing list for comment. Separately, he expected that the
main body would be changed to combine schemes by type (key agreement,
signature, encryption) rather than by family (DL, EC, IF). 

d) Lisa had posted a version of Annex C which was the the first full
version.  It was nearly complete (it had answers to all but one of the
questions).  She requested more discussion on the mailing list; Burt
pointed out that rationale will be very important as we present our case
to the balloting body and encouraged people to review the annex.

e) Burt had posted another version of Annex D (Security Considerations),
which followed the same outline as the March version, but had more details
filled in and addressed many of the comments that Burt had received.  In
particular, the latest version was more conservative than the March
version. He said he expected more comments from Carl Ellison on random
number generation.  Don mentioned that both ISO and ANSI were also looking
into random number generation. 

f) Mike and Phil had started work on the ASN.1 syntax in Annex G
(Formats).  Phil was re-working some ASN.1 structures; in particular, he
was making them more rigid and closer to ANSI X9.F1 standards.  We thanked
Phil for helping us; Leo, Mike and Phil said they would collaborate to
produce a version of Annex G by the June meeting.  More mailing list
discussion was expected before then.  Don requested that the structures
for identifying finite fields be hierarchical rather than flat (i.e.,
first the field type (GF(2^m) or GF(p)), then the basis type (normal vs. 
polynomial), then the actual basis).  We agreed that, in general,
hierarchical structures were preferable for their generality; at the same
time, we decided that it would be useful to provide shorthand notation for
certain commonly used constructs. 

2) We then discussed some administrative issues.

a) Burt reported that there had not been much new information on patents
since the last teleconference.  Everything received recently had been
posted to the web site (including letters from Bellare, Rogaway, Schnorr,
Williams and Zheng).  He had plans to follow up with those who had not
yet replied. 

b) Burt requested comments on the call for submissions for P1363a, which
he was planning to issue by the end of the week.  He said he would
schedule time for presentations at the August and November meetings.

c) We discussed the issue of balloting.  Terry Arnold had done some
research into this and sent a letter to Burt, which Burt would forward to
the mailing list.  Basically, if we wanted to stick with our schedule
worked out at the March meeting, we would need to ask the Microprocessor
Standards Committee (our sponsor) for permission to do so at their July
meeting.  Then we would start forming the balloting body.   In order to do
that, we would need to agree on a complete version of the document at our
June meeting, do final internal review in July and early August, and have
a draft ready for balloting at the Crypto meeting.  Since we seemed to be
mostly on schedule since the March meeting, we decided this was feasible.
We also decided to post the schedule for completion on our web site.

3)  We discussed plans for the near future.  The June meeting would start
on Monday, June 29; in order to have ample time to review everything, we
were aiming to post all the sections of the document on the web site by
Monday, June 15.  Burt and Lisa were planning to finalize the main body
and Conformance.  Burt was also planning to finalize Security
Considerations.  Mike, Phil and Leo were hoping to finalize Annex G
(Formats) after some mailing list discussion.  Lily said she would forward
the latest version of X9.42 as a contribution for posting to the web site;
it had some ASN.1 constructs that could help with Annex G.  Jerry and Leo
would add tables to Annex A (Number-Theoretic Background).

We adjourned at 10:50am Pacific Daylight Time