[TLS] Re: WG Last Call: draft-ietf-tls-mlkem-08 (Ends 20 26-07-08)

Eliot Lear <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.tls
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi!

~~~~Disclaimer
I'm not a cryptographer.
~~~~

Please see below.

On 08.07.2026 08:04, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 07, 2026 at 10:27:56PM -0700, Christian Huitema wrote:
>
>> I just read Jacob Applebaum's message. Given his description of the
>> late-standardization suspicious change that looks like a backdoor in the
>> ML-KEM specification, I agree with his conclusion. The WG should not ask for
>> publication of the current graph, not until the changes requested by Jacob
>> are made.
> The removal of whitening of the `m` random input to Encaps is not a
> plausible backdoor.  If all you have is a broken RNG, you're free to
> apply whitening to obtain a new less bad RNG and use that instead.
>
> Nothing stops an ML-KEM implementation from hashing some input (any
> number of times, mixing in whatever additional inputs, ...) to produce
> its random values.  The abstract algorithm starts from the final output
> of an adequate RNG that requires no further post-processing.
>
> There's nothing suspicious about this simplification.  The critique in
> question makes no sense to me.  Don't use a broken RNG.

That sounds about right to me, but as someone who is not a 
cryptographer, perhaps someone who is could explain how this amounts to 
a back door, and not a requirement for a good PRNG? And if it's not a 
back door, should we really relitigate NIST's choices here?

Eliot


* By "back door", I mean an intentionally placed undisclosed weakness 
that could be exploited by the people who placed it there.

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