[throw0101d]

> https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-paramete...

Further the draft that this is all about does not make a recommendation for its use. The currently IETF-recommended TLS algorithms are: X25519MLKEM768, x448, x25519, secp384r1, secp256r1.

As noted by someone on the IETF list [1] there are already ML-KEM-only implementations in various libraries, so if we want interoperability then it's best to have a standard document. No one is forcing anyone to use this algorithm, and it's not even 'officially' recommended (per above).

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/SXo4iVmp0ng_vi57ce...

[g-b-r]

If it's supported it will be used, e.g. by vendors which decide for some reason to use it

Null encryption used to be supported as well, and no one was forced to use it.

But when something insecure is supported by a protocol it will lead to security hiccups.

If it's dangerous it shouldn't be supported.

[lokar]

But that’s not what the IETF is. They don’t police, they encourage collaboration and standardization between implementers.

[ButlerianJihad]

Heh heh heh.

I recall the early-to-mid-90s when the IETF was a powerhouse, churning out foundational standards and documents monthly, and every time I read a foundational RFC for some protocol I wanted to learn, the "Security Considerations" section was intentionally left completely blank and un-considered.

I don't know if it was recklessness or expediency or a very calculated tactic (the Internet was invented by DARPA, after all) but Internet protocols were so ridiculously insecure, and based on absurd trust models that were repeatedly broken, and everything always transmitted in plaintext (because, of course, all networks were physically wired, secured, and only the good guys could tap into them).

It was an absolute Wild West clown college as the Internet transitioned to commercial and privatized use cases, and I suppose it guaranteed job security for generations of cybersecurity experts and cryptographers.

[leonidasrup]

In the 90s, you as a private person were not supposed to have access to encyption which could not be broken by NSA.

"The longest key size allowed for export without individual license proceedings was 40 bits, so Netscape developed two versions of its web browser. The "U.S. edition" had the full 128-bit strength. The "International Edition" had its effective key length reduced to 40 bits by revealing 88 bits of the key in the SSL protocol."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

[tptacek]

No. In the 1990s, you weren't allowed to export cryptography the NSA couldn't break. Strong cryptography was widely available in the 1990s.

(I had the pleasure of shipping a commercial product, back in the days when those things shipped in shrink-wrapped boxes, that carried strong cryptography, and had to deal with the export regime. It was not fun.)

[mswphd]

note that this says something more limited than what you're saying. Specifically, an american company was not allowed to give access to the cryptography you describe to non-Americans.

This was still a very bad policy, but private americans were allowed to have strong cryptography.

[g-b-r]

They publish what become standards, you can't just support any existing option in an encryption protocol (if you want to have a secure one).

[AdamN]

The standardization process should weed out 'footguns' that are prone to accidentally (or maliciously) lowering the security bar.

[dhx]

To point out some positive examples of what RFCs should include:

RFC 5288 s3 (AES-GCM): "Each value of the nonce_explicit MUST be distinct for each distinct invocation of the GCM encrypt function for any fixed key. Failure to meet this uniqueness requirement can significantly degrade security."[1]

RFC 7748 s5 (X25519): "The cswap function SHOULD be implemented in constant time (i.e., independent of the swap argument)."[2]

By contrast, this proposed RFC for MLKEM provides a single encouragement:

"[NIST-SP-800-227] includes guidelines and requirements for implementations on using KEMs securely. Implementers are encouraged to use implementations resistant to side-channel attacks, especially those that can be applied by remote attackers."[3]

It's not even a SHOULD, it's just an encouragement in a non-normative section of the RFC.

When you go to the referred NIST SP 800-227 it then tells you it's all too hard anyway and good luck and have fun figuring it out yourself:

"Cryptographic modules for KEMs should be designed with appropriate countermeasures against side-channel attacks. This includes protecting against timing attacks with constant-time implementations and protecting memory from leakage. Universal guidelines are unlikely to be helpful as exposure to side-channel attacks varies significantly with the desired application, and countermeasures are often costly."[4]

The normative standard FIPS 203[5] which the draft MLKEM RFC relies upon NEVER mentions "side channel", "constant", "timing" or provides any other assistance to implementers on how to securely multiply and/or divide numbers on computers or how to deal with conditional branching. Fair enough it includes a lower case "should" for considering side-channel resistance, but this throwaway comment is inadequate for standardisation.

The main reason it is inadequate is, imagine you're on your Hardened Gentoo or some other uber-geek laptop with the most advanced and thoroughly tested side channel resistant MLKEM client imaginable. You want to access your bank's website that offers MLKEM-only TLS. You don't have any assurance the bank's implementation of MLKEM has implemented any side channel resistance because the RFC they claim to have implemented never required it. If you then extrapolate from historical woes of implementing side channel resistant crypto (ECDSA scalar multiplication for example), it's probably correct to assume someone has, or reasonably could at some point in the future, extract private keys from the bank's side, and thus your expectations of having a secure connection are unmet. This is a standardisation problem because two implementations cannot agree on whether the protocol offers any resistance to side channel leakage to remote adversaries, therefore, what is the security guarantee the two implementations can actually agree upon?

The key missing section of this RFC is perhaps a restriction on its application similar to:

"This standard does not require implementations to consider side-channel attacks. This standard SHOULD NOT be used for protecting data and communications where an adversary may have one or more of: a) physical access to equipment performing cryptographic operations and time and resources necessary to observe physical properties of the equipment (power and signal characteristics, electromagnetic radiation, thermal dissipation), b) ability to execute code on equipment performing cryptographic operations, c) remote access to high-resolution monitoring data of physical properties of equipment performing cryptographic operations, d) ability to observe and/or establish a session to a party using this cryptographic protocol."

Thus it'd only be applicable to low risk environments such as two servers in a government building in separate rooms where an adversary is prevented from conducting a side channel attack by a plethora of other security controls.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5288#section-3

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7748#section-5

[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-mlkem/

[4] https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...

[5] https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.203.pdf

[tptacek]

You are confused about what this RFC is. It's not the enabling RFC for PQC in TLS, or for MLKEM. It's documentation about a specific set of parameters for doing pure, as opposed to hybrid, MLKEM. It defers the guidance you're looking for to other RFCs.

[dhx]

From RFC8446 (TLSv1.3) sE.4: "In general, TLS does not have specific defenses against side-channel attacks (i.e., those which attack the communications via secondary channels such as timing), leaving those to the implementation of the relevant cryptographic primitives."[1]

But draft-ietf-tls-mlkem just handballs to FIPS 203 for description of cryptographic primitives, and FIPS 203 doesn't care about side channel resistance. The token reference to NIST SP 800-227 for how to securely implement MLKEM also offers no suggestions on side channel resistance.

The draft MLKEM IKEv2 RFC[2] has the same problem.

Which standard, if not draft-ietf-tls-mlkem, changes the draft-ietf-tls-mlkem specification of the following cryptographic primitive:

Original: "Decaps(sk, ct) -> shared_secret: A decapsulation algorithm, which takes as input a secret decapsulation key sk and ciphertext ct and outputs a shared secret shared_secret."

To include side channel resistance, for example:

Improved: "Decaps(sk, ct) -> shared_secret: A decapsulation algorithm, which takes as input a secret decapsulation key sk and ciphertext ct and outputs a shared secret shared_secret. Decaps() MUST be implemented as a constant time function to ensure the time needed to execute Decaps() does not differ for different sk and ct values."

Some further examples of RFCs which do care about specifying side channel resistance:

RFC 9980 (OpenPGP PQC) s9.3: "This specification makes use of the default "hedged" variants of ML-DSA and SLH-DSA, which mix fresh randomness into the respective signature-generation algorithm's internal hashing step. This has the advantage of an enhanced side-channel resistance of the signature operations according to [FIPS-204] and [FIPS-205]."[3]

RFC 9941 (SSH sntrup761x25519-sha512) s4: "As discussed in the security considerations of [RFC8731], the X25519 shared secret K is bignum-encoded in that document, and this raises the potential for a side-channel attack that could leak one bit of the secret due to the different length of the bignum sign pad. This document resolves that problem by using string encoding instead of bignum encoding."[4]

(this RFC 9941 example has the benefit of showing how draft-ietf-tls-mlkem could take problematic cryptographic primitives from FIPS 203 and tighten the specification within an RFC to enforce side channel resistance)

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8446/#appendix-E.4

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ipsecme-ikev2-ml...

[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9980/#section-9.3

[4] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9941/#section-4

[mswphd]

using pure ML-KEM is not a footgun. Some people may have doubts about lattice-based cryptography, despite being securely deployed in Chrome nearly a decade ago. Some people have doubts about many things. The fact that people have doubts does not make the scheme a "footgun".

[tptacek]

It is if literally the only thing you've ever read about the technical details of LWE cryptography is Daniel Bernstein.

[mswphd]

you'd probably call it "Product NTRU" then, and be a minimum a decade out of date. So you'd probably have to do all that weird shit with co-different ideals Peikert was trying to get us all to do (I know it was "right" but sometimes you need to put a muzzle on the math guys for all of our sakes).

[chrismorgan]

> there are already ML-KEM-only implementations in various libraries, so if we want interoperability then it's best to have a standard document

“People are already doing it, so we might as well rubber-stamp it even if it’s not great” introduces problems of its own: people will perceive that rubber-stamping as validating it, and now they’ll use it even more, where perhaps if you held back, they wouldn’t.

(There are counter-arguments as well, of course. A couple of relevant cases that spring to mind where a body has not aligned with usage or expectations: W3C lost control of HTML, and it was probably for the best, but they remain a relevant body in closely-related areas; and OSI licence approval is a horribly broken political process which is almost universally misunderstood and close to frozen in time, yet they haven’t suffered like they should have for their misdeeds, they pretty much got away with it. There was also that thing somewhat recently about FedRAMP rubber-stamping Microsoft Cloud despite it failing dismally, because US government agencies had already started using it too much; and I wonder what that does to their credibility.)

This is also a concern with informational/independent submissions through IETF. They are frequently perceived as having IETF/standards weight.

[tptacek]

These are arguments, but I don't really understand what they're arguments for. At issue here is whether or not the IETF should document usage of pure-MLKEM TLS. There are environments where people are going to use pure-MLKEM TLS, whether Bernstein likes it or not. His argument is that the IETF should pretend that isn't happening, and throw up weird procedural obstacles to it.

[chrismorgan]

I know approximately nothing about the specific case here, and don’t believe I have any skin in the game. I intended my comment purely abstractly: I’m not commenting on anything technical, merely mentioning a procedural concern: that the line I quoted can sound reasonable, but that I don’t think it’s actually a reasonable argument by itself, because of the likely consequences of such actions. (That is: if that happened to be the only argument—though I doubt it is—there’s a compelling case for rejecting it.)

[g-b-r]

If it's documented it will be implemented by many more libraries and applications, that's the argument

[tptacek]

It already exists. In fact, there are environments where it has to exist. So the argument he's making is that the IETF should pretend it doesn't exist.

[g-b-r]

Can you (or someone else) please give some example of those environments?

[some_furry]

Telecoms.

I wrote at length about this debate in my blog post about threat modeling: https://soatok.blog/2026/06/30/soatoks-informal-guide-to-thr...

[throw0101d]

> “People are already doing it, so we might as well rubber-stamp it even if it’s not great” introduces problems of its own: people will perceive that rubber-stamping as validating it, and now they’ll use it even more, where perhaps if you held back, they wouldn’t.

The GOST cipher, which is Russia's AES equivalent, is also in an RFC:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9189

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOST_(block_cipher)

Is the IETF validating its use?

The GOST document is categorized in the same way as the one currently being debated/discussed: Informational. It also has "N" under the "Recommended" column (like ML-KEM-only will have):

* https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-paramete...

[ekr____]

In fairness, I do think that this situation is somewhat different. As I noted above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812792), there are two main routes to an Informational RFC of this kind.

* Through the IETF

* Through the Independent Stream

The GOST documents went through the Independent Stream and therefore do not have IETF imprimateur. These documents are proposed for the IETF Stream and therefore require IETF Consensus to publish.

I know this is all super confusing. The basic problem is that the vast majority of RFCs come out of the IETF and so people often act as if all RFCs do. This is of course in part why people pursue Independent Stream publication rather than just publishing things on their own..

[throw0101d]

I have gotten flack for giving ULA+NPTv6 as a possible solution to an IPv6 multi-homing issue because the RFC that describes it was 'only' "Experimental":

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6296

When I pointed out that the NAT(44) RFC (1631/3022) was 'only' "Informational" I got radio silence:

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1631

[ekr____]

I have no opinion on ULA+NPTv6, other than Experimental doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. How else would people experiment. It does mean that the level of vetting by the IETF is potentially lower.

WRT IPv4 NAT, I'm not sure how much we can infer from the status. Many people at IETF were (and some still are) very anti-NAT, in part because they felt that IPv6 was the right solution. As a result, the IETF really avoided doing anything that looked like it was endorsing NAT, even though it's obviously just a fact of the Internet.

[throw0101d]

My general point is that the category or track of an RFC may mean different things to different people (assuming they're even aware of them at all).