[CFRG] Re: NIST PQC: HQC Announced as a 4th Round Selection

[Neil Madden <[e-mail]>]

On 12 Mar 2025, at 13:12, John Mattsson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Neil Madden wrote:
> >It is a shame that Classic McEliece wasn’t selected, as it seems eminently suitable for SAML/OIDC and other SSO/Federation use cases where keys are often established out of band and changed rarely.
>  
> I agree. The small ciphertexts of Classic McEliece makes it eminently suitable for a lot of use cases.
>  
> It would have been good if poeple provided these kind of comments during the NIST process, not 5 min after NIST announced that they will not standardize Classic McEliece...

I barely have time to keep track of the standards I care deeply about. PQC is way down the list of things I worry about. (I mostly care about it not making things slower/fatter/less efficient).


> I did my part... :)
> https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/Events/2025/workshop-on-guidance-for-kems/documents/papers/ml-kem-is-great-paper.pdf
> https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/Presentations/2025/ml-kem-is-great/images-media/ml-kem-is-great.pdf
>  
> Loganaden Velvindron wrote:
> >In the meantime, there is the ISO standard being prepared:
> Deirdre Connolly wrote:
> >and not wanting to conflict with the ongoing ISO standard for now
>  
> I wrote before that Ericsson plans to use Classic McEliece. That there is no public standard might delay these plans significantly. Ericsson will not use a paywalled ISO standard. We believe paywalled cryptographic standards pose cybersecurity risks, and as a result, we have removed all paywalled cryptographic standards from our internal list of acceptable algorithms. We are against IETF and CFRG referring to paywalled crypto standards.
>  

+1 to this. It would be good to see a CFRG RFC for Classic McEliece (or a hybrid using it).

— Neil