Still, why endorse and practically make everyone implement an algorithm that only the NSA wants, while there is a superset already standardised.
This is about the known bad actor NSA forcing through their own special version of a crypto building block they might downgrade-attack me to.
I pay like 1% overhead to also do ecc, and the renegotiation to the non-hybrid costs 2x and a round-trip extra. This makes no sense apart from downgrade attacks.
If it turns out ecc is completely broken, we can add the PQ only suite then.
> Problem is PQ signatures are large. If certificate chain is small that could be acceptable, but if the chain is large, then it can be expensive in terms of bandwidth and computation during TLS handshake. That is the exchange sends many certificates which embed a signature and a large (PQ) public key.
> Merkle Tree Certificates ensures that an up to date client only needs 1 signature, 1 public key, 1 merkle tree witness.
> Looking at an MTC generated certificate they've replaced the traditional signing algorithm and signature with a witness.
> That means all a client needs is a signed merkle root which comes from an expanding Merkle Tree signed by the MTCA (Merkle Tree CA), which is delivered somehow out of band.
> The central problem is the sheer size of these new algorithms: signatures for ML-DSA-44, one of the most performant PQ algorithms standardized by NIST, are 2,420 bytes long, compared to just 64 bytes for ECDSA-P256, the most popular non-PQ signature in use today; and its public keys are 1,312 bytes long, compared to just 64 bytes for ECDSA. That's a roughly 20-fold increase in size. Worse yet, the average TLS handshake includes a number of public keys and signatures, adding up to 10s of kilobytes of overhead per handshake. This is enough to have a noticeable impact on the performance of TLS.
> If you tried to make "ML-KEM Certificates" (using a newer mechanism called AuthKEM where you authenticate by proving you can decrypt a challenge rather than signing), you would replace the ~2.4 KB ML-DSA signature with a ~1 KB ML-KEM ciphertext. This saves about 50% of the bandwidth compared to ML-DSA, but it is still roughly 35x larger than a traditional ECC certificate chain.
Still, why endorse and practically make everyone implement an algorithm that only the NSA wants, while there is a superset already standardised.
This is about the known bad actor NSA forcing through their own special version of a crypto building block they might downgrade-attack me to.
I pay like 1% overhead to also do ecc, and the renegotiation to the non-hybrid costs 2x and a round-trip extra. This makes no sense apart from downgrade attacks.
If it turns out ecc is completely broken, we can add the PQ only suite then.
thanks sophie. now if only this would get as many eyeballs as the inciting one
sigh
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743372 re: the Cloudflare Merkle Tree draft:
> Problem is PQ signatures are large. If certificate chain is small that could be acceptable, but if the chain is large, then it can be expensive in terms of bandwidth and computation during TLS handshake. That is the exchange sends many certificates which embed a signature and a large (PQ) public key.
> Merkle Tree Certificates ensures that an up to date client only needs 1 signature, 1 public key, 1 merkle tree witness.
> Looking at an MTC generated certificate they've replaced the traditional signing algorithm and signature with a witness.
> That means all a client needs is a signed merkle root which comes from an expanding Merkle Tree signed by the MTCA (Merkle Tree CA), which is delivered somehow out of band.
From "Keeping the Internet fast and secure: introducing Merkle Tree Certificates" (2025-10) https://blog.cloudflare.com/bootstrap-mtc/ :
> The central problem is the sheer size of these new algorithms: signatures for ML-DSA-44, one of the most performant PQ algorithms standardized by NIST, are 2,420 bytes long, compared to just 64 bytes for ECDSA-P256, the most popular non-PQ signature in use today; and its public keys are 1,312 bytes long, compared to just 64 bytes for ECDSA. That's a roughly 20-fold increase in size. Worse yet, the average TLS handshake includes a number of public keys and signatures, adding up to 10s of kilobytes of overhead per handshake. This is enough to have a noticeable impact on the performance of TLS.
Are ML-KEM certs impractically large too?
ML-KEM is a key establishment scheme, not a signature scheme.
From Gemini then:
> If you tried to make "ML-KEM Certificates" (using a newer mechanism called AuthKEM where you authenticate by proving you can decrypt a challenge rather than signing), you would replace the ~2.4 KB ML-DSA signature with a ~1 KB ML-KEM ciphertext. This saves about 50% of the bandwidth compared to ML-DSA, but it is still roughly 35x larger than a traditional ECC certificate chain./? AuthKEM:
kemtls/draft-celi-wiggers-tls-authkem: https://github.com/kemtls/draft-celi-wiggers-tls-authkem
"KEM-based Authentication for TLS 1.3" https://kemtls.org/draft-celi-wiggers-tls-authkem/draft-celi... :
> Table 1. Size comparison of public-key cryptography in TLS 1.3 and AuthKEM handshakes.
"KEM-based pre-shared-key handshakes for TLS 1.3" > "2.2. Key Encapsulation Mechanisms", "3. Abbreviated AuthKEM with pre-shared public KEM keys": https://kemtls.org/draft-celi-wiggers-tls-authkem/draft-wigg...Is this the thing with ML-KEM, then:
> [With AuthKEM,] you would replace the ~2.4 KB ML-DSA signature with a ~1 KB ML-KEM ciphertext.