EC weirdness

[Michael StJohns]

Hi -

Every so often I run into some rather strange things in the way the Sun 
EC classes were built.  Most recently, I was trying to use the SunEC 
provider to do a PACE like protocol.  Basically, the idea was to be able 
to generate public key points on the P-256 curve, but with a different 
base point G (knowledge of G' or having a public key generated from G' 
would allow you to do a valid ECDH operation, keys with disjoint points 
would not).

I was able to generate a normal key pair using ECGenParameterSpec with a 
name, so I grabbed the ECParameterSpec from the public key, made a copy 
of most of the stuff (curve, cofactor), but substituted the public point 
W from the key pair I'd just generated, and passed that in as G to the 
new parameter spec.  I tried to initialize the KPG with my *almost* 
P-256 spec, and it failed with "unsupported curve".

Looking into the code and tracing through 
sun.crypto.ec.ECKeyPairGenerator to the native code, I'm once again 
surprised that all of the curves are hard coded into the C native code, 
rather than being passed in as data from the Java code.

Is there a good security reason for hard coding the curves at the C 
level that I'm missing?

This comes under the heading of unexpected behavior rather than a bug 
per se I think.   Although - I'd *really* like to be able to pass a 
valid ECParameterSpec in to the generation process and get whatever keys 
are appropriate for that curve and base point.

Later, Mike