On 11/11/2015 21:02, Alex Chen wrote: > I see there is a list of recommended list by NIST in > http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/documents/dss/NISTReCur.pdf, > but it is very old (1999) > Is there a up to date list of elliptic curves approved or recommended > for government use in OpenSSL? > Is NID_X9_62_prime256v1 the strongest? First of all, it depends on *which government*, NIST is for the USA Government only, though some allied countries may have copied their decisions. Secondly, since ca. 1999, the official list has been mostly unchanged, namely those that are listed in the official NIST standard FIPS 186-2 for use with ECDSA and in NIST Special publication SP 800-56A for ECDH. So far, the public adjustments have been: 2005: The official Suite B list of ciphers was published and included the P-256 and P-384 bit curves as minimum. Around the same time they made a secret Suite A list of ciphers for stuff more secret than "top secret". 2015: NSA announced that they will soon start work on a new list, and that government departments should not waste taxpayers money doing the upgrade to Suite B just a few years before it becomes obsolete. However for use at this time they recommend P-384 or 3072 bit RSA/DH as a good minimum while accepting the next step down (P-256 or 2048 bit RSA/DH) in already built systems. They also recommend the use of pure symmetric key solutions with strong (256 random bits) keys as the best current solution where possible. The (non-classified) current official advice can be read at https://www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/suiteb_cryptography/index.shtml Enjoy Jakob -- Jakob Bohm, CIO, Partner, WiseMo A/S. https://www.wisemo.com Transformervej 29, 2860 S?borg, Denmark. Direct +45 31 13 16 10 This public discussion message is non-binding and may contain errors. WiseMo - Remote Service Management for PCs, Phones and Embedded -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-users/attachments/20151111/315b0505/attachment.html>