Re: [Cfrg] draft-atkins-suit-cose-walnutdsa on the Independent Stream

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 5:38 AM Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
wrote:

>
> Hiya,
>
> On 20/01/2020 04:28, Martin Thomson wrote:
> > If this were widely-deployed not-good crypto, that might change the
> > situation, but the potential for harm in terms of misunderstanding
> > the status of the mechanism seems significant enough to argue for not
> > publishing even then.  In my view.  But, as ISE, that is Adrian's
> > choice and Adrian's choice alone.
>
> I agree that publishing this now would be detrimental. Once
> the NIST PQ stuff reaches a conclusion (in a yearish maybe?)
> then I'd expect we'll see a bunch of CFRG RFCs documenting
> (some of) the set of algs that that process has produced as
> "winners." I think it'd send a very confusing signal to
> implementers if other RFCs describing crypto that aims to
> be quantum resistant (or protocols using such) are emitted
> ahead of those.
>
> After those "winners" are known and sufficiently well
> documented, then I'd not object to Derek's draft being
> considered again, either by the ISE or CFRG, but having
> pretty much any "post quantum" RFC published now seems
> to me a bad plan, for any RFC stream.
>
> Two other notes - if the ISE does decide to publish this
> then I'd bet the ISE is likely to see more people doing
> the same with other algorithms that are no longer in the
> running in NISTland, which seems undesirable. (Were there
> 95 original entrants? I forget;-)

This seems like an important point and one that in general applies to
cryptographic algorithms. I would encourage the ISE to develop a policy
around "alternative" algorithm publications. I would note that the trend in
IETF (or at least in the HTTP-QUIC-TLS-verse) is away from requiring RFCs
in order to register code points, so at least that reason has less force.

-Ekr

Finally, if the ISE did
> publish something like this, I'd really hope there'd be
> content in the document that explains how this algorithm
> got on in NISTland - I didn't see such text in the draft
> (but only scanned it quickly) and am not even sure one
> could craft good text now, while the NIST process is
> still running.
>
> So overall: "Dear ISE - please say no or put this one
> on hold 'till the NIST thing is done."
>
> Cheers,
> S.
>
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