Author: Gregory Maxwell 2014-04-04 17:08:05
Published on: 2014-04-04T17:08:05+00:00
In an email exchange, Matt Whitlock questioned the proposal to switch from prime fields to a binary field, stating that breaking up a secret into small pieces cannot assume that each piece will be strictly less than an 8-bit prime modulus. Furthermore, converting to base conversion would require arbitrary-precision integer math anyway, so there is no reduction in code. However, the proposer suggests using the binary extension field of GF(2^8) as it provides many secret sharing and data integrity applications that are already operating over it. The proposer argues that anything efficiently encoded as bytes can be efficiently encoded over GF(2^8). In response to Whitlock's question about implementation simplicity, the proposer stated that complexity is easier to manage when broken down into individually testable parts rather than one complex part. Implementing arithmetic mod some huge P requires a significant amount of work unless a high-level language with integrated bignums is used.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:25:53.610089+00:00