[CFRG] New labels in draft-irtf-cfrg-concrete-hybrid-kems-01

[Mike Ounsworth <[e-mail]>]

draft-irtf-cfrg-concrete-hybrid-kems-01 publish on Oct 20 and made the
following label changes:


"QSF-P256-MLKEM768-SHAKE256-SHA3256" -->  "|-()-|"
"QSF-P384-MLKEM1024-SHAKE256-SHA3256" --> " | /-"


Please tell me this is a joke. Then please remove this from the draft and
put the labels back to sane alphanumeric. I'm sorry for strong language
below, but this makes me mad.

I have been bending over backwards to make the LAMPS thing match the HPKE
thing, including multiple rounds of interop-testing against your test
vectors and changing the LAMPS draft, reference impl, and test vectors to
match yours. This has resulted in delayed publication of the LAMPS draft by
several months to accommodate interop with the HPKE draft. The LAMPS
Composite-KEM doc went into WGLC on Oct 17 now using HPKE-style labels of
the form "QSF-MLKEM768-P256-SHA3256" that we pulled FROM YOUR DRAFT instead
of the OID-based labels we had before. Then on Oct 20 you publish a new
version that goes and changes the labels to this nonsense. Can you guys
please at least pretend like you care about interop between these two docs?

My specific objections to more ASCII art labels:

1. We're already having interop problems at the PQC hackathon group because
of the backslash in the xwing label -- for example, in python you have to
put the constant in your source code as "\\.//^\\" to prevent it from
interpreting that as an escaped dot and double-quote. We've also had
similar problems representing this label properly in HTML and markdown
docs. Now you want more labels that have both backslashes and now spaces.
This is GOING to lead to at least incompatibilities if not CVEs.

2. The label is not human-readable; it doesn't tell my anything useful
about the content, nor will it be easy to debug mistakes in source code or
config files. At this point, assigning a numeric codepoint would be
preferable.

3. This does not establish a naming convention that is easily extensible to
other hybrid combinations.

I have been doing everything in my power to work behind the scenes to get
interop between these two documents, and it feels like you guys are doing
everything in your power to obstruct it.

Can you please put your labels back so that they match the LAMPS draft
using the pattern "QSF-MLKEM768-P256-SHA3256".

(PS this is a re-send from the correct email address)

-Mike