Re: Perfect Forward Secrecy - is it worth it?

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Simon Spero writes:
> Quick survey; how important is perfect forward secrecy to you?

Very. It makes one's life far easier. It makes protecting historical
traffic easy. Its a wonderful feature for a cryptosystem.

> In general, schemes offering PFS require a extra PK-op, and an extra 
> round-trip when compared to  non-PFS schemes. This cost is incurred once 
> per "session", but can add on the order of seconds to startup times. 

Well, things aren't that bad if you use eliptic curve variants on D-H,
or if you are very careful. See Phil Karn's work on this for Photuris...

Perry