Subject: [COSE] [OPS-DIR] draft-ietf-cose-dilithium call Opsdir review
From: tirumal reddy <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked], Last Call <[email-masked]>, [email-masked], JOSE WG <[email-masked]>, cose <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2025 19:01:19 +0530
List-Id: CBOR Object Signing and Encryption <cose.ietf.org>

Document: draft-ietf-cose-dilithium
Title: ML-DSA for JOSE and COSE
Reviewer: Tirumaleswar Reddy
Review result: "Ready with Issues"

Hi,

I have reviewed this document as part of the Ops Area Directorate's ongoing
effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the IESG. These
comments are written primarily for the benefit of the Ops Area Directors.
Document editors and WG chairs should treat them like any other Last Call
comments.

The draft is well-written and addresses an important need for PQC
migration.  I have a few operational and deployment-related observations
that may help improve the document:

1. ML-DSA produces significantly larger public keys and signatures compared
to traditional algorithms. This size increase can create challenges for
deployments with limited bandwidth, memory, or processing capacity.  I
suggest adding text to highlight it.

2. I suggest adding a reference to Section 8.3 of
draft-ietf-lamps-dilithium-certificates, which explains the rationale for
disallowing HashML-DSA.

3. It may be useful to add a note to explain why only the seed format was
chosen for private keys, given that the LAMPS WG selected the expanded
private key format to maximize interoperability with existing
implementations.

4. You may want to refer to the security considerations in
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-lamps-dilithium-certificates/
and discuss if randomized signing is preferred over deterministic signing.

Cheers,
-Tiru