[lamps] Mohamed Boucadair's No Objection on draft-ietf-lamps-pq-composite-sigs-18: (with COMMENT)

Mohamed Boucadair via Datatracker <noreply@ietf.org> Fri, 10 April 2026 14:23 UTC

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From: Mohamed Boucadair via Datatracker <noreply@ietf.org>
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Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:23:06 -0700
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CC: draft-ietf-lamps-pq-composite-sigs@ietf.org, housley@vigilsec.com, lamps-chairs@ietf.org, spasm@ietf.org
Reply-To: Mohamed Boucadair <mohamed.boucadair@orange.com>
Subject: [lamps] Mohamed Boucadair's No Objection on draft-ietf-lamps-pq-composite-sigs-18: (with COMMENT)
Archived-At: <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/spasm/gFRRpmEP0PH7BvHtPHqwV-9aJmg>

Mohamed Boucadair has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-lamps-pq-composite-sigs-18: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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Hi Mike, all,

Thank you for taking care of my previous review [1]. The changes made in
-15/-18 [2] are great.

As indicated in the thread [1], I let you decide whether further changes are
needed especially for this point:

> Section 2 says the following:
>   This specification assumes a seed-based keygen for ML-DSA.
>
> Maybe I'm misreading this, but is this saying that only the seed mode is
> supported? If so, isn't that a deviating from 9881 where expandedKey is
allowed?

Mike: You are not misreading that. There was extensive debate in the WG on this
point and the WG was very clear not to download the {seed, expanded, both} mess
into composites. It is not uncommon for one RFC to profile another one; IE to
take only a subset of the features from the other RFC. So I think it's
"profiling 9881" not "deviating from 9881". Also note that since
Composite-ML-DSA is a distinct algorithm from ML-DSA with distinct object
identifiers and distinct key encodings anyway, it's only a spiritual difference
at best.

[Med] Thank you for confirming that I was not hallucinating :-) Great to see
this is an informed decision from the WG. So, all is set for me ... except
maybe that I would prefer if this is stated clearing in the document, but I
leave that to you to decide.

Cheers,
Med

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/spasm/C1oyS0AOxpO8Z8CR5tv0VroErfw/

[2]
https://author-tools.ietf.org/iddiff?url1=draft-ietf-lamps-pq-composite-sigs-15&url2=draft-ietf-lamps-pq-composite-sigs-18&difftype=--html

[lamps] Mohamed Boucadair's No Objection on draft… Mohamed Boucadair via Datatracker