Re: [TLS] Comments on draft-celi-wiggers-tls-authkem-00.txt

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2021 at 9:10 PM Kampanakis, Panos <kpanos=
[e-mail]> wrote:

>
>
> > So, while I'm not that enthusiastic about paying a few K, I think on
> balance it's a better than doing this kind of major rearchitecture of TLS.
>
>
>
> +1. KEMTLS is a great scheme but significantly changes the TLS state
> machine. It introduces implicit and explicit auth concepts which do not
> exist in TLS 1.3 and would need further security proofs and study. Also, it
> may save ~1-2KB of data (Falcon, Dilithium assumed), but still uses PQ Sigs
> in the PKI which means we go to 10+ KB for the cert chain. So we alleviate
> 1-2KB, but still have to deal with 10+. Also note ia.cr/2019/1447 which
> makes the argument that the more the data the more the slowdown in lossy
> environments (which intuitively makes sense as the loss probability (1-(1-p)
> n) increases with more packets). Imo the draft-celi-wiggers-tls-authkem
> should be considered for future versions of TLS as the drastic changes do
> not justify the marginal benefit.
>

Part of what came out of the work on TLS 1.3 is a reusable formal model of
TLS, and at least some of the work in KEMTLS has repeated this formal
analysis.


>
> And a couple of comments regarding Ekr’s points:
>
>
>
> > - If you are doing TLS over TCP, then the server can use IW10 as
> specified in RFC 6928. This will allow the server's first flight to be
> about 14 KB, which should be large enough.
>
>
>
> That is not completely accurate. The smallest Dilithium parameters will
> fit in 10MSS only when doing plain TLS (no SCTs, no OCSP staples) with up
> to 2 ICAs. Anything else will go beyond 14KB. Now if we talk web (include
> SCTs), then only 1 ICA would fit with Dilithium-II.
>
>
>
> Having said that, if we talk about the other lattice based NIST PQ Sig
> Finalist, Falcon-512, then there are more TLS cases (up to 3 ICAs) where
> the data would fit in an TCP initcwnd.  For Falcon-1024 that is not the
> case either.
>
>
>
> > - If you are doing QUIC, then the server is restricted to 3x the
> client's initial message, which is potentially a problem with very large
> server first flights, but the client can add extra bytes to its Initial
> messages to increase the limit [0]
>
>
>
> Padding to the client initial message to 1200B would mean the QUIC
> amplification attack protection would kick in for any PQ KEM Round 3
> Finalist and any PQ Sig Finalist, even Falcon-512 which is the smallest
> one. The smallest PQ Sig will still be >3x when used with X25519+the
> biggest PQ KEM Finalists. I am not sure what dummy key exchange data and
> how much of it someone could put in the client message in order to reach
> 2.5KB in the request in order for the response to fit in the 3x2.5 window
> necessary (assuming 2 ICAs).
>
>
>

SQISign is short! It's just slow to sign, which KEMTLS avoids. Also with a
known set of intermediates the public keys do not need transmission, and
the tradeoffs between signature, public key, verification, and signing
speed further shift. One could conceivably use XMSS roots to sign SQISign
intermediates of moderate duration signing FALCON or Dilthium KEM keys,
balancing security and performance at each level. I think this fits in 14KB
with realistic conditions. We shouldn't assume that NIST candidate
signature schemes are the last word here.

I think the best answer to the extra round-trip problems which are
> inevitable for PQ Sigs (as shown in ia.cr/2020/071 , dl.acm.org/
> <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386367.3431305>doi
> <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386367.3431305>/10.1145/3386367.3431305
> <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386367.3431305>) is Martin’s draft-
> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-thomson-tls-sic>thomson
> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-thomson-tls-sic>-
> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-thomson-tls-sic>tls
> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-thomson-tls-sic>-sic
> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-thomson-tls-sic> which
> should be revived imo.
>
>
>
> Cert compression will not help as these big certs mostly consist of big
> keys or sigs which are random sequences and thus do not benefit from
> compression.
>

In some sense draft-thompson-tls-sic is compression with a dictionary of
known intermediates.

>
>
> Rgs,
>
> Panos
>

Sincerely,
Watson Ladd
-- 
Astra mortemque praestare gradatim