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Thank you for the summary!

>"new elliptic curve cryptography we [Silent Circle] developed."

???

is... this a good idea? I would of thought libraries for this technique abound.

FWIW, I suspect Phil Zimmermann from Silent Circle is one of the very few people in the world for whom that reservation probably isn't automatically correct…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann

For the rest of us - HELL YEAH! Do not develop your own crypto!

Strange that they say "we", because in the previous interview, they said Dan Bernstein helped them to create some new 205-bit curve or something. Previously they were using the NIST curves in the SCIMP protocol. They should probably just use Curve25519, unless they think that's too overkill.

I don't know too much about cryptography, but for an asynchronous communication method like email, is there such a thing as encryption overkill? For example, does it matter whether the message takes two seconds or five seconds to decrypt/encrypt (particularly if that encryption/decryption happens in the background of your mail app)? Are there other issues as you increase the number of bits on the curve?

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