[openpgp] Size of ML-DSA Secret key in draft-ietf-openpgp-pqc and other considerations

Simo Sorce <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.openpgp
Organization Red Hat
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I have 3 comments for this draft:

Secret key for ML-DSA
=====================

I see that in the PQC draft in table 7 the Secret key for ML-DSA is
referred to as a fixed 32 bytes quantity. This means you are assuming
that a seed is always available and used to store a private key.

As already raised in LAMPS there is no assurance that hardware tokens
will always be able to import/export a seed. In the PKCS#11 standard it
is allowed to store a secret ML-DSA key with a private key value only
(expanded as per FIPS203 definition of private key which is not the
seed), as well as optionally provide a seed for import, as there is HW
that may prefer or needs to store the expanded form.

I am not sure it really matters how keys are stored when a PGP
implementation uses a HW token, however if these definitions are used
to construct an exchange format they should be amended to allow
exchanging an expanded key when a seed is not available.

If these definitions are never used to construct an exchange format for
private keys then it should still be noted that how the secret key is
stored depends on what is available (seed, vs expanded key, or both)
and the size column could be eliminated or amended to list both options
in terms of sizes.


Code points
===========

Considering the limitation of small tokens, it would be really useful
if a non-hybrid option (for example ML-DSA-87 which is also the only
algorithm allowed by CNSA 2.0 that fits PGP's scope) would be made
available to reduce the amount of storage necessary on small smartcard-
like devices.


Signature data digests
======================

Again to be able to comply with CNSA 2.0 guidelines it would be useful
if SHA2-384 or SHA2-512 were allowed for signature data digests, given
the guidelines do not allow SHA3 or SHAKE outside of the internal
implementation of signature algorithms.



Best,
Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Distinguished Engineer
RHEL Crypto Team
Red Hat, Inc

_______________________________________________
openpgp mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.