[TLS] Re: Complaint to ADs and IESG regarding TLS WG chairs falsely claiming WG consensus to issue an RFC for draft-ietf-tls-mldsa

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 2:08 PM Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 02:01:08PM -0700, Watson Ladd wrote:
> > On Wed, May 27, 2026, 1:48 PM Simon Josefsson <simon=
> > [e-mail]> wrote:
> > > Repeating that statement doesn't make it true.  The analog motivation
> > > for doing PQ hybrids is Man-In-The-Middle attacks.  If your non-hybrid
> > > PQ signature has a weakness (e.g., implementation bug), it facilitate
> > > man-in-the-middle's.
> > >
> >
> > The only way to achieve that is to have a quantum computer at the time of
> > attack
>
> Not so.  Find the victim's classical public key (they'll gladly tell you
> it), use a quantum computer to break it off-line and recover the private
> key, then use the private key at will to impersonate the victim, then
> its counterparties become victims too.

Correct: you have to have a quantum computer *before* mounting the attack.

Or to put another way, todays connections are not compromised by
tomorrows computers.
>
> Nico
> --



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