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X25519 has seen broad adoption (in the key exchange). Ed25519 has not, you can't actually use an Ed25519 certificate on the web. It's in a deadlock between CAs, browsers and TPM manufacturers (and to some extent NIST, because Ed25519 has not been approved by them).

It's not being blocked per se, you can use it mostly (98%) without any issues. Though things like Amazon SES incorrectly reject letters with multiple signatures. Google and Microsoft can't validate them when receiving. It's more that a few common implementations lack the support for them so you can't use _just_ Ed25519.



> (and to some extent NIST, because Ed25519 has not been approved by them).

Ed25519 (and Ed448) have been approved for use in FIPS 186-5 as of February 2023:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdDSA#Standardization_and_impl...


Oh, great to know. That gives me hope that we'll see Ed25519 certificates at some point then.


THE CABForum just updated its guidelines (in December) and elliptic curve wise only NIST P-256, NIST P-384 and NIST P-521 are accepted. (See https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline- requirements/requirements/#615-key-sizes)

So on the general web it seems remote at best.


> THE CABForum just updated its guidelines (in December) and elliptic curve wise only NIST P-256, NIST P-384 and NIST P-521 are accepted.

NIST P-curve certs were acceptable per the Base Requirements all the way back in 2012

* https://cabforum.org/uploads/Baseline_Requirements_V1_1.pdf

See "Appendix A - Cryptographic Algorithm and Key Requirements (Normative)", (3) Subscriber Certificates.


I'm well aware I should have added a "still" in the sentence somewhere. All efforts to have Ed25519 on the general web seem to run out of steam, we can find https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-moskowitz-eddsa-pki-06... IETF side, https://lists.cabforum.org/pipermail/servercert-wg/2024-June... is the last discussion CABforum side.

Ed25519 certs do work with TLS (OpenSSL support at least), but without browser adoption it's machine to machine with private CA only .




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