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[Last-Call] Re: [TLS] Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-tls-mldsa-03.txt> (Use of ML-DSA in TLS 1.3) to Informational RFC

"D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to> Tue, 02 June 2026 22:32 UTC

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Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:30:48 -0000
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From: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>
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Subject: [Last-Call] Re: [TLS] Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-tls-mldsa-03.txt> (Use of ML-DSA in TLS 1.3) to Informational RFC
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John Mattsson writes:
> It does not present anything that has not already been discussed
> publicly.

Huh? Are you claiming, e.g., that there was already something in public
like <https://cr.yp.to/papers/mldsa-20260601.pdf#breakable-keys>? Where?

Are you disputing the paper's estimates of the number of breakable
ML-DSA-44 keys vs. the number of breakable Ed25519+ML-DSA-44 keys? If
so, which step of the analysis are you disputing, and why? If not, how
can you possibly continue to recommend solo ML-DSA?

> I wish that those in academia advocating hybrid signatures had spent
> some effort producing technically sound and deployable hybrid
> specifications

For TLS, simply sending and verifying both signatures is just fine.
Normally the first signature is a fixed-length ECC signature, and then
you can trivially concatenate the two signatures. Done.

> While Bernstein focuses on implementation errors in untested reference
> code from 2017,

Actually, that was the _tested_ official Dilithium 1.0 reference code,
plus the _tested_ official Dilithium 1.0 AVX2 code. The paper explains
why the tests didn't catch the bug, and explains how easily ML-DSA
implementors today can fall into the same trap. The paper also covers
many more errors than this.

> important security properties of ML-DSA (non-malleability and BUF)

Irrelevant to TLS.

---D. J. Bernstein


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