Minutes of the December 5th 2023 meeting

[johngray-dev]

December 5th, 2023 Minutes:

Present at the meeting: John Gray, Mike Ounsworth, Markku-Juhani Saarinen, Jan Klaubner, Alision Becker, Julian Prat, Carl Wallace

Discussion Items:

• Team agreed to a Virtual Interim Hackathon Meeting on Saturday January 27th during the day!
• Next Hackathon monthly meeting is moved to Tuesday January 9th.
• Discussed some LAMPS mailing list topics. Some discussions about pulling out the details in the Dilithium (ML-DSA) signature scheme outside core boundary (the mu public key and message hash). This likely would not be accepted by FIPS, but interesting thought is that perhaps there could be two parts to a FIPS algorithm (a Message side) and an algorithm side. Then both parts would need to be certified.
• Mike mentioned the comments from Dietre about putting in the KEM details in CMS.
• Discussed a bit about the pre-hashing - Falco had mentioned we need a flag for hash and pre-hash (domain separate it).

Round Table Discussion regarding Hackathon Project

• John Gray - Need to fix a couple issue and post new update artifacts, need to update composites and a couple small changes to the KemRecipientInfo draft
• Markku - Sent comments to NIST about splitting up Algorithm into components. He is interested in hashing for Hardware. He reports that hash based signatures can be super fast on Hardware - SHA3 makes it fast. Dilithium uses about 50% of time on SHA3 hashing. In hardware they can implement a full SHA3 as a single instruction. Dilithium uses hashes like a stream Cipher (iterations)- hashing in SHA2 in counter mode is slower in those applications. SHAKE XOF puts in data and outputs it at the same speed and SHA3 is super parallelable. In summary hash based signatures in hardware mitigate slow performance.
• Carl Wallace - working on a KEM and looking for CMS KEM artifacts - Web Assembly (Wasm) stuff is on the side burner. Julien is also working on KEM.
  • Action: John ask David H if he has KEM artifacts he can share with Carl.
• Alison Becker - Had to fix the ASN.1 in her draft (multi-auth binding). Simplified the mechanism in the implementation. Brendan should be posting artifacts soon. Asked if there are some good ASN.1 resources. Carl Mentioned the Layman's Guide (http://luca.ntop.org/Teaching/Appunti/asn1.html) as well as the larmouth book (https://www.oss.com/asn1/resources/books-whitepapers-pubs/larmouth-asn1-book.pdf ). Alision is tracking the KEMRI draft, hope it goes through. Alison also asked about lining up the composite work with the spectrums draft (From https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/423). The answer is yes. Alison also asked about proof composability. Seems like we need to read about it in more detail.
• Jan Klaubner - Welcomed Jan to the group - Jan Introduced Botan library to the Crypto library - C based crypto project, and important to the German Government. BSI is funding Botan. Hopefully a maintainers of the library will join next time. Jan also may be able to include artifacts from own internal product in the future. Eventually Botan will likely integrate K of N composites or composite signatures which BSI needs.
• Julien Pratt - No updates since the last IETF meeting. Working on implementing CMS - What should we do with this Kyber within CMS draft? Is it a one line draft "use this OID with KEMRecipientInfo". John G wondered if something like a registry would make it easier.
• Mike Ounsworth - No update - lots of day job catching up. Lots of LAMPS discussion and writing emails. Mike also presented at the CAB forum last week in regards to key attestation.