[saag] Re: post quantum guidance draft

Stephen Farrell <[email protected]> Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:25:25 +0000

Newsgroups	gmane.ietf.saag
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hiya,

On 12/12/2025 13:52, Salz, Rich wrote:

> I guess I was too cute, trying for a Lord of the Rings reference. I 
> didn’t mean “rule” in any real sense of constraining what IETF WG’s 
> do. Each of the many WGs you summarize wants to do PQ stuff and 
> thinks they should. An IETF document that says “this part is fine, 
> but maybe don’t do that part right now” is going to contradict all 
> those efforts.

Well, it's not saying "don't do" to implemeters but rather
"don't deploy" to those deploying.

But, it's a fair point to say that if a WG has developed PQ
deployment guidance for a protocol, then that specific
guidance should over-ride more generic guidance.

I think having this (proposed) document could also make it
easier for WGs to finish their work, e.g. if we have general
guidance for hybrid KEMs (or x25519 and ML-KEM) that might
reduce the friction in WGs when they want to define other
codepoints that could be controversial in the absence of
general guidance.

> As for near-term guidance, how do we know when the time has come?

The time for this guidance (IMO:-) is... now.

And the time to supercede it is when we know how to do
sigs for email and the web and related PKIs. Maybe in a
year or two.

After that, maybe when there's some credible PQ story from
plants or related to dnssec.

Cheers,
S.

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