Re: [IPsec] New Version Notification for draft-tjhai-ipsecme-hybrid-qske-ikev2-03.txt

["Tobias Guggemos" <[e-mail]>]

> > #4 Big Keys (e.G. Classic McEliece)
> > In general there was consensus that we should find a way to enable the use of McEliece keys.
> > The problem is that McEliece keys are >1MB in size and thus can not fit into the KE payload
> > (which has a 16 bit size field).
> Exchanging such big keys would unnecessarily slow down IKEv2 to a crawl. There are multiple candidates in the NIST PQ Project that offer pk+ct sizes of a few kilobytes. It is likely that some will be standardized. Classic McEliece performance seems much slower than other candidates as well. 
> Sorry I missed it, but why was it decided that supporting Classic McEliece is a must? 

There is no decision made on this, at the end this is a question to be discussed and agreed on in the WG.
However, with McEliece being the proposal which is most trusted in the crypto community, there will be people wanting to support it (let it be governmental institutions with strict security requirements).
We had "consensus" on:
1) that the draft should support the possibility to exchange McEliece keys without "breaking" the protocol again. 
2) we all hope that we won't need it! =)

Correct me if I'm wrong.

> Panos

Cheers Tobias