[CFRG] Re: Silithium - A Compact, Efficient and Non-separable Hybrid Signature

[John Mattsson <[e-mail]>]

I am happy that you are so interested in what I have to say, but this is quite clearly a misquotation. The full sentence I wrote was:

"That actually seems compatible with the view that securing the randomness should be done by the application and not the algorithm.”

(At the risk of repeating myself: not only are the mechanisms different, but the problems they are intended to address are different as well. If ML-KEM, like a signature scheme, had a message input containing entropy independent of the RNG, hashing the randomness m together with the message input would likely have provided protection against attacker-controlled RNGs.)

Cheers,
John Preuß Mattsson

From: D. J. Bernstein <[e-mail]>
Date: Wednesday, 22 July 2026 at 18:03
To: [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
Subject: [CFRG] Re: Silithium - A Compact, Efficient and Non-separable Hybrid Signature

Sorry, I really don't understand how to reconcile the following two
statements: (12 July 2026) "securing the randomness should be done by
the application and not the algorithm"; (22 July 2026) "I strongly
prefer hedged constructions. Purely random nonce generation has led to
major vulnerabilities in the past, whether due to implementation errors
or weak RNGs".

---D. J. Bernstein


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