[TLS] Re: Complaint to IESG regarding AD decision

["Bellebaum, Thomas" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Paul,

I am not quite sure why I am listed as ambivalent. Before the listed announcement on April 15th, the mail archive lists two messages by me on topic [0].
There is [1], in which I specifically write

> I agree with Stephen on this one and would not support adoption of non-hybrids.

And there is [2], stating

> Even with Recommended=N, I can imagine many managers reacting to a presentation on "YOU NEED TO USE PQC LIKE ML-KEM BECAUSE ELSE..." by googling "deploy ML-KEM now" and being recommended this rather than a safer hybrid[omitted reference]. I am not convinced that such a person, if given more knowledge, "doesn't want to do that".

which doesn't sound too ambivalent to me either. This is why in my own earlier count [3] I counted myself as "Against Adoption" on April 17th.
My guess is that some messages I wrote afterwards might have led you to believe I was ambivalent. Most notably, in response to your reply to my count I wrote in [4] that

> I still believe that not adopting this would have been better, but I am willing to follow along and help improve the document.
> After all, perhaps someone will convince me in the future that there are situations where PQ-only KEMs are better :)

In case that was misunderstood, I want to clarify that "playing along" was meant as a reaffirmation of my earlier statement in [3]:

> Neither am I threatening to appeal

And that as a direct consequence I was trying to influence the contents of this draft. In fact, there is an open pull request on the document by me [5].
What I did not say is that I was okay with the adoption, just not disagreeing enough to appeal, which seems to be inline with several people listed as "Against Adoption" in both our counts.

Best,

-- TBB

[0] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/tls/?q=Thomas%20Bellebaum
[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/YyemGJF-4-hRVwOcJ47Rw4Nu8Js/
[2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/aVBEbq2i3Zsurjtv77nY-Rwwhlo/
[3] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/JUwF8dv1KfniWGHAUX_oIgP-e2A/
[4] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/jGdaXlsAtER75XDatBcFdUW5ZUA/
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20251103101335/https://github.com/tlswg/draft-ietf-tls-mlkem/pull/6