HECC License (was: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell Weekly News: Issue 130 - September 12, 2009)

hecc-0.1. Marcel Fourné [5]announced the first release of hecc, the Elliptic Curve Cryptography Library for Haskell. Implemented are affine, projective, jacobian and modified jacobian point formats with the basic operations. Included as an Example is a basic ECDH as well as a basic speed test.
This is great news - I hope it finds its way into the crypto library. One question - is this license a derivative of something I would have heard about? IANAL, but have just read the license it sounds fairly permissive in that it doesn't mandate distribution of source code (BSDish). Was this the intent? Did I miss something? Thomas

Thomas DuBuisson wrote:
hecc-0.1. Marcel Fourné [5]announced the first release of hecc, the Elliptic Curve Cryptography Library for Haskell. Implemented are affine, projective, jacobian and modified jacobian point formats with the basic operations. Included as an Example is a basic ECDH as well as a basic speed test.
This is great news
Thanks for your interest!
- I hope it finds its way into the crypto library.
Erm, I didn't plan that atm, but might be a nice idea. Will have to look up their API and brush my code up "a bit". My interface is just written to keep up with the "strange" bitlength of ECC-curves, like NIST-P521 (that is no typo, it is _not_ 512bit), NIST-P244, NIST-P571 etc., so I see it as not directly fitting to use size-of-2-length Datatypes. That might give some speedup at the cost of wasting space, but I haven't tried it.
One question - is this license a derivative of something I would have heard about? IANAL, but have just read the license it sounds fairly permissive in that it doesn't mandate distribution of source code (BSDish). Was this the intent? Did I miss something?
Yeah, it's the MIT X11 License and by the virtue of that it grants for all practical purposes the same rights as the BSD3, but there is no way to mix it up with the BSD4, which is the reason I chose it. -- Marcel Fourné OpenPGP-Key-ID: 0x74545C72

- I hope it finds its way into the crypto library. Will have to look up their API and brush my code up "a bit".
Fair enough, but the Crypto library is past due for a major overhaul. I just stirred a pot about networking and still need to get around to seriously addressing that so I won't be stirring the Crypto pot any time soon. So what I'm suggesting right now is: don't worry too much about the Crypto API, worry more about having a good API and hope a Crypto overhaul happens. Thomas
participants (2)
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Marcel Fourné
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Thomas DuBuisson