Session Date/Time: 17 Mar 2025 10:00

pquip

Summary

The Pequip meeting covered document status updates, presentations on potential new working group documents related to stateful hash-based signature schemes and HSM adaptation for PQC, and a discussion on efficiency in post-quantum cryptography, leveraging stateful protocols. The meeting also included a presentation and subsequent discussion about the IETF's handling of cryptography and its implications for quantum resilience.

Key Discussion Points

Document Status: Update on the terminology, hybrid schemes, hybrid signature spectrum, and post-quantum cryptography for engineers documents.
Hackathon Interoperability Testing: Jean-Pierre Fizzé presented on recent hackathon activities focused on interoperability between different vendors and crypto libraries, specifically regarding MLDSA, ML-KEM, and SLH-DSA implementations.
PQC Public Side Meeting Summary: A summary of the PQC public side meeting was presented, covering EU timelines, UK recommendations, discussions on FrodoKEM, NIST standards, and debates on hybrid approaches.
Stateful Hash-Based Signature Schemes: Tom Meher presented on operational aspects of stateful hash-based signature schemes, highlighting the challenges of key management and reliability in systems requiring long-term key usage.
Adapting HSMs for PQC: Thiru presented a draft on optimizing PQC integration in constrained HSMs, including seed-based key generation, message digestion for MLDSA, and firmware updates. The suitability of this work within the IETF charter was questioned.
Efficiency in Post-Quantum Cryptography: Britta presented a strategy used within the MLS working group to achieve post-quantum confidentiality and authenticity efficiently using parallel sessions. It uses PSK drive from post quantum sessions and injects into standard sessions.
Private Key Format Discussion: Deirdre Connolly presented on the recent decision in the LAMPS working group regarding private key formats for MLDSA and ML-KEM, settling on a choice of seed only, key only or both, within ASN.1 encoding due to legacy implementations.
Critique of IETF Cryptographic Process: A presentation was given on the IETF's handling of cryptography with a critique of the CFRG and the delays in producing RFCs that are needed for PQC transitions.

Decisions and Action Items

Stateful Hash-Based Signature Schemes: Discuss the draft on the mailing list for a month, followed by a call for adoption.
Adapting HSMs for PQC: Further discussion on the mailing list regarding the scope, content, and potential adoption of the HSM adaptation draft, with consideration of OASIS PKCS11 involvement.
IETF Cryptographic Process: AD Paul Hoffman will bring the concerns raised in the presentation about IETF cryptographic processes to the IESG retreat.

Next Steps

Authors to address comments and suggestions on the respective drafts received during the meeting and on the mailing list.
Continue discussion on the mailing list.