[TLS] Re: New Liaison Statement, "Liaison communication to IETF regarding draft-ietf-tls-mlkem"

[Russ Housley <[e-mail]>]

Eric:

> This seems to me to be a set of distinct questions from this liaison
> statement. It seems to me that there are at least three main cases
> here:
> 
> 1. Algorithms which the IETF is working on and is going to recommend
> and/or has recommended (Recommended=Y)
> 2. Algorithms which the IETF is working on but is not going to recommend.
> 3. Algorithms which the IETF is not working on
> 
> Case (1) requires an RFC publication and therefore I think we can ignore
> this one for this discussion. Case (3) will not be published as an RFC
> and so people who want to implement them just need to rely on the I-D
> or whatever other document was provided to the experts, and the
> code point reflects that document.
> 
> This leaves us with Case (2). I agree that it's useful for third parties
> to be able to distinguish whether a given notional algorithm is
> "finished" in the sense that the IETF might publish an updated
> version of that algorithm, potentially with a different code point.
> That normally happens with RFC publication, but we find ourselves
> in the difficult case where an algorithm *is* being worked on in the
> IETF but there is real contention about whether it should be published [0],
> leaving us in an unfortunate situation. This case should be rare,
> however, because algorithms which are adopted are typically
> published, and I don't think it's particularly hard to distinguish from
> cases like draft-10 of some future version of TLS.
> 
> If this document is published as an IETF RFC, then the problem will go
> away. If not, then there will be a number of choices:
> 
> - The ISE can publish the document as an RFC (assuming the ISE
>   is willing.)
> - The external SDO can publish their own document specifying
>   the algorithm, potentially using some content form this one [1].
> - The external SDO can hold their nose and cite the I-D.
> 
> Of course these are also the exact same choices said SDO
> would have if the IETF had never taken up the document in the
> first place.

The case we are talking about is an algorithm document that was adopted by the TLS WG.  Of course, adoption is not a guarantee that there will be an RFC; however, it does signal to other that the TLS WG is planning to do so.

Russ