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[TLS] Re: New Liaison Statement, "Liaison communication to IETF regarding draft-ietf-tls-mlkem"

Daniel Apon <dapon.crypto@gmail.com> Mon, 06 April 2026 00:16 UTC

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From: Daniel Apon <dapon.crypto@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:16:19 -0400
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Subject: [TLS] Re: New Liaison Statement, "Liaison communication to IETF regarding draft-ietf-tls-mlkem"
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Hi Peter,

I remember, and enjoyed, your talk slides about an abacus and a dog.
Scribble is adorable.
It was not, as you claim for whatever reason, a breakthrough in that paper
to provide a ZKP for their claim of a smaller reversible ECC-addition
circuit; such techniques have been proposed many times before. (I don't
particularly think it was especially useful to provide a ZKP attesting to
knowledge of a smaller reversible ECC-addition circuit, but oh well. One
can go verify the semantics of their NP language, their ZKP software, and
their ZK proof, etc., if you like.)
Also, I suppose "the middle distance" is Google's 2029 deadline now.


Let me turn to a more important point (or, points) by Usama in this thread:

"IMHO, unless some technical rationale is provided by IEEE 802.11, this LS
should just be read as 'someone somewhere in the world would like to use
pure ML-KEM' and TLS WG should not serve as a *printing press* for such
requests."

I completely disagree with the characterization that  'someone somewhere in
the world would like to use pure ML-KEM.' It's dismissive of the current
situation.
Not only has the international community, after more than a decade of
work,  aligned on ML-KEM as the PQ-KEM standard, but IEEE (as a computer
scientist, IEEE is not no one!) is requesting that the TLS WG "please stop
delaying."


Even further up the thread, Usama writes:

"I was actually hoping to see some *technical rationale* for support of
publication."

May I please point you to
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.203.pdf
or
https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography/email-list
for overwhelmingly sufficient technical rationale?


If the international consensus on ML-KEM as the post-quantum KEM standard
is insufficient, would you please explain further what you explicitly
desire in terms of *technical rationale*?


Kind regards,
--Daniel

On Sun, Apr 5, 2026 at 10:24 AM Peter Gutmann <pgut001=
40cs.auckland.ac.nz@dmarc.ietf.org> wrote:

> Viktor Dukhovni <ietf-dane@dukhovni.org> writes:
>
> >Recent theoretical progress on reducing the resource requirements (logical
> >qbits, and circuit sizes, i.e. gate counts and time) for breaking 256-bit
> ECC
> >with Shor's algorithm, may have reduced the perceived value of the ECC
> >components of hybrids for some QC "optimists" who were betting on CRQC's
> to
> >show up in O(decade), but now think it may much sooner than previously
> >expected.
>
> It's yet another paper, following 25 years of well-established precedent,
> that
> begins with the authors gazing into the middle distance and saying
> "assuming
> we have a functioning magic device" and then constructing some elaborate
> framework based on this imaginary device.  Except that in this case they're
> not even telling us what the framework for the imaginary device is.
> There's a
> page or two of vague generalising about what they can do towards the start,
> and the remainder of the 57-page paper is telling us how terrible things
> will
> be if the magic works.
>
> We can't even get someone to perform the same astounding feat of
> mathematics
> as a barking dog or an abacus yet because no-one knows what's been
> discovered.
> The real breakthrough in the paper seems to be the elaborate means they've
> come up with to hide what they've actually done.
>
> So I'm not losing any sleep over it.
>
> Peter.
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