Re: [Cfrg] Review of draft-irtf-cfrg-hpke-02

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hiya,

On 18/12/2019 13:24, John Mattsson wrote:
> The PR looks good. 

Assuming you mean [1]...

Since I didn't get a substantive response on the list,
I'll repeat:

"Urgh. Why do we always need to define every possible
option even though there's no real demand? There are
already far too many combinations of modes and suites
in hpke."

Having more or less finished my implementation now, I
feel more strongly that additional combinatoric mess
is a bad plan. Removing options/simplifying would be
far better.

We (CFRG) could punt on this by using existing IETF
IANA registries instead of creating new ones. There is
an almost fine match between what we need and some
existing registries (if one squints just a little;-)
that'd remove all this wrangling from our plate and
that could result in the hpke RFC having only one MUST
implement kem, kdf and aead. Additional options could
then be haggled over in the IETF each time someone
claims a need before subsequently being ignored by
almost all implementers and an even higher proportion
of deployments;-)

Cheers,
S.

[1] https://github.com/cfrg/draft-irtf-cfrg-hpke/pull/23/