>so we will be sure to post slides
If possible it would be good if NIST could share slides before the meeting. That way you can get more insightful feedback during the meeting.
Cloudflare's recent very useful blog post states that:
"A final quirk of stateful hash-based signatures is that their security is bottlenecked on non-repudiation: the listed LMS instance has 192 bits of security against forgery, but only 96 bits against the signer themselves creating a single signature that verifies two different messages."
https://blog.cloudflare.com/another-look-at-pq-signatures/
800-208 states:
"This possibility does not affect the formal security properties of the schemes because it remains the case that only the signer could produce a valid signature on a message."
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-208.pdf
Just looking at this very quickly I tend to agree with NIST. It seems to me that XMSS and LMS do offer non-repudiation in the sense that the signer cannot deny responsibility for performing any of the signatures. The missing property seems rather to be some exotic message commitment property for signatures. When updating 800-208, I think it would be if NIST clearly states if the SHBS signatures offer non-repudiation (In FIPS 205 it is mentioned in the abstract) and if any exotic property is missing.
Cheers,
John
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Sebastien Riou
Director, Product Security Architecture
PQShield Ltd
M: +33 782 320 285
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I agree with Simo.
A scheme that increases the risk of two independent systems using the same tree with different counters sounds like the worst of all worlds.
That said, an _auditing_ mechanism that allows external tracking of which states have been used, should be fine (you can do this simply by auditing the signatures produced).
> All that said, now that there is a standardized stateless signature
scheme (SLH-DSA) that has all the good properties of LMS and does not
have critical failure modes when recovering from backup, why bother
with increasing the usability of LMS at all?
Yeah, I have the same question. Is anyone actually waiting for a fixed LMS instead of using SLH-DSA?
---
Mike Ounsworth
> PQShield continued to think about state and backup management and
> ultimately came to the conclusion that things would be more robust if we
> could split the secret key in two parts:
> - the stateless part: includes parameters and secret seeds
> - the stateful part: the monotonic counter (referred as q in RFC8554
> section 5.2)
>
> The stateless part could be then backed up just like any other stateless
> key, so we would be in known territory here.
> The stateful part still requires particular care but since its content is
> not a secret and its mutation is fully deterministic, we can manage it in
> new ways.
>
> We describe briefly two of those new ways in the attached file. There are
> many variations around those ideas. We presented them to some major HSM
> manufacturers, signing service providers and large OEMs. We received mostly
> positive feedback however two questions have been consistently raised:
> - Is it compliant with CAVP and CMVP ?
> - If not, do you plan to approach NIST to make it happen ?
>
> I therefore share it here now that revision of SP800-208 seems imminent.
>
> Best regards,
>
>
> Sebastien Riou
>
> Director, Product Security Architecture
>
> PQShield Ltd
>
>
>
> M: +33 782 320 285
>
> E: sebasti...@pqshield.com
>
>
>
> On Mon, 18 Nov 2024 at 15:22, 'dustin...@nist.gov' via pqc-forum <
> pqc-...@list.nist.gov> wrote:
>
> > All,
> >
> > We have posted the slides from John Kelsey's presentation on NIST's
> > planned update for SP 800-208:
> >
> >
> > We also recorded a video of the presentation. If you'd like access,
> > please contact me and I can share the video. NIST plans to have a
> > follow-up meeting for some additional discussion and feedback. Details
> > will be announced when that is set up.
> >
> > Dustin Moody
> > NIST
> >
> > On Friday, November 8, 2024 at 8:18:32 AM UTC-5 dustin...@nist.gov wrote:
> >
> > > All,
> > >
> > > NIST SP 800-208, *Recommendation for Stateful Hash-Based Signature
> > > Schemes*, was published in 2020. We've received feedback from some in
> > > industry in regards to the restriction against private key export as laid
> > > out in 208. In response, NIST has held a few public discussions about
> > > possible options about how to deal with issue. NIST would like to share
> > > our approach for how we plan to revise SP 800-208 that would enable key
> > > export, but also mitigate security concerns.
> > >
> > > For those interested, NIST will hold a virtual meeting where John Kelsey
> > > will outline our path forward. We realize this is short notice, so we will
> > > be sure to post slides, and record the talk as well. Thanks,
> > >
> > > Dustin
> > >
> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
> > >
> > > Date: Wednesday, November 13th
> > > Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5)
> > >
> > >
> > > Microsoft Teams *Need help? <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://aka.ms/JoinTeamsMeeting?omkt=en-US__;!!FJ-Y8qCqXTj2!dSjVi585rJE2nH3K9YQ9hjtouT5aZHb1TpWSilbl8ToVT5xv5bRBjXTVWgIkn-Q-TAitxI_-n4tndGyc$>*
> > > *Join the meeting now
> > > <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19*3ameeting_ZDVlZmEyZTMtODkyYi00OGRmLThlM2EtODY2OThjMTZlNTli*40thread.v2/0?context=*7b*22Tid*22*3a*222ab5d82f-d8fa-4797-a93e-054655c61dec*22*2c*22Oid*22*3a*22dd46ae92-6bb7-47b9-aaf6-07052c29b63a*22*7d__;JSUlJSUlJSUlJSUlJSUl!!FJ-Y8qCqXTj2!dSjVi585rJE2nH3K9YQ9hjtouT5aZHb1TpWSilbl8ToVT5xv5bRBjXTVWgIkn-Q-TAitxI_-n7bvyVNU$>*
> > > Meeting ID: 220 481 575 152
> > > Passcode: vRCadd
> > > ------------------------------
> > > Dial in by phone
> > > *+1 443-339-4347 <(443)%20339-4347>,,505996741#* United States, Sherwood
> > > Forest
> > > *Find a local number
> > > Phone conference ID: 505 996 741#
> > > Join on a video conferencing device
> > > Tenant key: 1013...@teams-us.bjn.vc
> > > Video ID: 118 970 311 8
> > > *More info
> > >
> > > --
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> > email to pqc-forum+...@list.nist.gov.
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> > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/d/msgid/pqc-forum/80a8d299-9434-404e-8fc4-c24a3c174486n*40list.nist.gov__;JQ!!FJ-Y8qCqXTj2!dSjVi585rJE2nH3K9YQ9hjtouT5aZHb1TpWSilbl8ToVT5xv5bRBjXTVWgIkn-Q-TAitxI_-n3uz6872$
> > <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/d/msgid/pqc-forum/80a8d299-9434-404e-8fc4-c24a3c174486n*40list.nist.gov?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer__;JQ!!FJ-Y8qCqXTj2!dSjVi585rJE2nH3K9YQ9hjtouT5aZHb1TpWSilbl8ToVT5xv5bRBjXTVWgIkn-Q-TAitxI_-n5QJX7eO$>
> > .
> >
>
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Simo Sorce
Distinguished Engineer
RHEL Crypto Team
Red Hat, Inc
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Aren't you increasing the risk of having the "stateless" part reused if
you separate it from the "stateful part"?
The scheme you propose below requires all HSMs to always be online and
reachable therefore each of them is a single point of failure.
The most sensible scheme for distributed HSMs is to partition the
counter space so that no two HSMs ever can use the same "counter", and
accept the loss of part of the space if one of the HSMs is
destructively lost. Allocating small chunks (of M values) at a time to
each HSM would allow to reduce the number of "lost counters" in case of
failure, while allowing individual HSMs to safely perform M signatures
while disconnected during transient networking issues or maintenance
windows. M can be tuned according to use case, to either maximize
throughput/resilience to failure, or maximize use of counter-space.
All that said, now that there is a standardized stateless signature
scheme (SLH-DSA) that has all the good properties of LMS and does not
have critical failure modes when recovering from backup, why bother
with increasing the usability of LMS at all?
CNSA needs to be changed, the recommendations are way far from optimal and having stateful hash signatures as the only option is just not something people should accept without question.
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Hi Sebastien,
I see. Your usecase does not need or benefit from parallelism. You are fine with the restriction that only one copy of this key will ever be active at a time (enforced operationally), but you want a solution where one device can fail and the next device can just resume, using some external state synchronization, which could be a clock or a signature audit service, or something.
In that case, I see your point that synchronizing one large but static private key (the tree) and one small but dynamic private key (the counter) is much easier than synchronizing a massive private key object.
---
Mike Ounsworth
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Sebastien Riou
Director, Product Security Architecture
PQShield Ltd
M: +33 782 320 285
Does a company use one key for all or at least several products? Or is it actually one key per product / major release?
Is only the final release being signed? Or each developer's build, test builds, nightly builds, artifacts in a CI/CD pipeline and so on? Is the code signing itself being tested regularly? How about some kind of (sub-) modules for the software with the basic release and each module being signed separately?
For some use-cases of code signing depending on how complex the build / test infrastructure is, this may mean hundreds of signatures per day which may exhaust an HBS key sooner than one would expect. And for the classical code signing with RSA or (EC)DSA this was managable.
Sebastien Riou
Director, Product Security Architecture
PQShield Ltd
M: +33 782 320 285
Some vendors have thousands of packages with hundreds to thousand
potentially built in a single day. Your use case is tied to a specific
production pipeline you are familiar with but it is not the only way
software is built, and increasingly teams are moving to faster
cadences.
Sebastien Riou
Director, Product Security Architecture
PQShield Ltd
M: +33 782 320 285
Hi Dustin and team,
First of all, we’d like to thank you for listening to the feedback from
the industry, and for the presentation last week on this topic. Crypto4A
would be happy to contribute to this discussion, and collaborate on
defining an appropriate private key format that incorporates the additional
information required to implement “Scheme #2” of John’s presentation. We
have a format that we’ve been using extensively for 6+ years that we think
will work well for this purpose, and which we’re happy to share with the
rest of the community.
At Crypto4A, we’ve been using HSS as a way to secure our HSMs (e.g., FW
signing, attestation, etc.) since 2018 and we use a concept we refer to
as sectorization which appears to be the same as “Scheme #2” in the
presentation slides. It is based on, and is essentially an instantiation
of, the reservation systems described in section 5 of McGrew et. al.’s
original HBS state-management paper. In our scheme, the private key is
divided into 2d sectors that each cover a mutually exclusive set of OTS
keys, and there is a separate step to “provision” each sector that is
required prior to signing. Fundamentally, establishing a distinction
between the “setup” and the “provision” steps decouples the state management
problem from the operational signing considerations. This has many
advantages, including the ability to perform concurrent signing operations,
scale the performance, provide resilience against disasters, have geo-
redundancy, etc.
We agree with all of the requirements and constraints you’ve outlined in
your presentation. However, we have gathered a few additional requirements
both from our own use of the method, as well as many interactions with
various parties in the industry. In order to reference them more easily
later on, here is a summary of all the requirements gathered so far (“N”
refers to requirements outlined by NIST, and “C” refers to additional
requirements we would like to add):
As an HSM vendor, we strive to offer solutions that work for as many use
cases as possible (i.e. crypto-agility by design) while understanding that
different sets of constraints may apply based on the specific circumstances.
When it comes to scheme #2, we believe that the responses to the
questions at the end of John’s presentations are as follows:
Take care, and thank you once again for continuing this discussion within the
PQC community!
Jim and the rest of the Crypto4A team
From: 'dustin...@nist.gov' via pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Sent: November 18, 2024 9:23 AM
To: pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Cc: dustin...@nist.gov <dustin...@nist.gov>
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Thanks Jim. Well worded. At a first glance, I see no problems with your proposed technical content.
This is a nit, but for:
“C5c: Should require a minimal level of expertise to maintain.”
I think here you mean “maintain” as in “requires minimal expertise to operate because the HSM hides all the complexity” and not “requires minimal expertise for an HSM vendor to implement the sectorization algorithm”?
I suggest instead: “C5c: Should require a minimal level of expertise to initially configure and operate over time a crypto module operating in this mode”.
Also, can you please comment specifically on:
“N5: Should avoid using patents.”
Can you please comment directly on whether Crypto4A holds or is aware of any patents around your sectorization method?
---
Mike Ounsworth
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/d/msgid/pqc-forum/000d01db3c59%2476e003b0%2464a00b10%24%40crypto4a.com.
The requirement in section 6.1 of SP800-208 on LMS key generation that dictates that “the same SEED value shall be used to generate every private element in a single LMS instance” must be relaxed to allow for the generation of sectors that cover a mutually exclusive set of OTS keys. We would not be averse to allowing these sector seeds to be generated from a root/master seed using a suitable one-way PRNG, provided that root/master seed is destroyed upon completion of the generation of the sector seeds.
Sebastien Riou
Director, Product Security Architecture
PQShield Ltd
M: +33 782 320 285
as sectorization which appears to be the same as “Scheme #2” in the
presentation slides. It is based on, and is essentially an instantiation
of, the reservation systems described in section 5 of McGrew et. al.’s
original HBS state-management paper. In our scheme, the private key is
divided into 2d sectors that each cover a mutually exclusive set of OTS
keys, and there is a separate step to “provision” each sector that is
required prior to signing. Fundamentally, establishing a distinction
between the “setup” and the “provision” steps decouples the state management
problem from the operational signing considerations. This has many
advantages, including the ability to perform concurrent signing operations,
scale the performance, provide resilience against disasters, have geo-
redundancy, etc.
We agree with all of the requirements and constraints you’ve outlined in
your presentation. However, we have gathered a few additional requirements
both from our own use of the method, as well as many interactions with
various parties in the industry. In order to reference them more easily
later on, here is a summary of all the requirements gathered so far (“N”
refers to requirements outlined by NIST, and “C” refers to additional
requirements we would like to add):
- N1: Must be able to recover from device failure.
- N2: Must not make assumptions on the number of devices that will be needed over the lifetime of the key.
- N3: Must allow for keys to move from one vendor to another.
- N4: Must minimize the changes to SP800-208.
- N5: Should avoid using patents.
- N6: Signatures must be performed within an HSM.
- C1: Must work for all variants of stateful HBS keys (XMSS, XMSSMT, LMS and HSS).
- C2: Must be compatible and compliant with CNSA 2.0.
- C3: Must support air-gapped/offline deployments.
- C4: Must support geo-redundancy deployments where the same key can be used concurrently in different geographies.
- C5: Should minimize the cost of ownership.
- C5a: Should be deployable using a single HSM. The purpose of this requirement is to reduce the initial cost of deployment. Naturally, it would be recommended to introduce some redundancy prior to a production-level deployment.
- C5b: Should be scalable (i.e., support parallelism, avoid performance bottlenecks, avoid “dead-time” for signature operations, allow for reallocation of devices based on needs, etc.).
- C5c: Should require a minimal level of expertise to maintain.
- C5d: Should not require additional services (e.g., synchronized and secure time, other HSMs used in different roles, and any other components that might add latency for operational use).
- C5e: Should allow for manual/procedural or fully automated support for state management.
As an HSM vendor, we strive to offer solutions that work for as many use
cases as possible (i.e. crypto-agility by design) while understanding that
different sets of constraints may apply based on the specific circumstances.
When it comes to scheme #2, we believe that the responses to the
questions at the end of John’s presentations are as follows:
- Is there some reason this won’t work?
- We have been using scheme #2 very successfully for over 6 years for our own manufacturing processes and it works.
- How hard will these be to allow in SP800-208?
- We would suggest that only a few changes to SP800-208 are necessary to accommodate scheme #2. They are as follows:
- The private key format for export must be extended to include the additional information (i.e., Merkle tree path data of upper d levels), and should be standardized to promote HSM interoperability and prevent vendor lock-in.
- The requirement in section 6.1 of SP800-208 on LMS key generation that dictates that “the same SEED value shall be used to generate every private element in a single LMS instance” must be relaxed to allow for the generation of sectors that cover a mutually exclusive set of OTS keys. We would not be averse to allowing these sector seeds to be generated from a root/master seed using a suitable one-way PRNG, provided that root/master seed is destroyed upon completion of the generation of the sector seeds.
- The requirement in section 8.1 of SP800-208 that dictates that “the cryptographic module shall not allow for the export of private keying material” should be relaxed as was described in the meeting on November 13.
- Will these meet industry needs?
- We believe so based on our interactions with companies and customers who have elected to utilize S-HBS.
Take care, and thank you once again for continuing this discussion within the
PQC community!
Jim and the rest of the Crypto4A team
From: 'dustin...@nist.gov' via pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Sent: November 18, 2024 9:23 AM
To: pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Cc: dustin...@nist.gov <dustin...@nist.gov>
Subject: [pqc-forum] Re: Update on SP 800-208
All,
We have posted the slides from John Kelsey's presentation on NIST's planned update for SP 800-208:
We also recorded a video of the presentation. If you'd like access, please contact me and I can share the video. NIST plans to have a follow-up meeting for some additional discussion and feedback. Details will be announced when that is set up.
Dustin Moody
NIST
On Friday, November 8, 2024 at 8:18:32 AM UTC-5 dustin...@nist.gov wrote:
All,
NIST SP 800-208, Recommendation for Stateful Hash-Based Signature Schemes, was published in 2020. We've received feedback from some in industry in regards to the restriction against private key export as laid out in 208. In response, NIST has held a few public discussions about possible options about how to deal with issue. NIST would like to share our approach for how we plan to revise SP 800-208 that would enable key export, but also mitigate security concerns.
For those interested, NIST will hold a virtual meeting where John Kelsey will outline our path forward. We realize this is short notice, so we will be sure to post slides, and record the talk as well. Thanks,
Dustin
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Date: Wednesday, November 13th
Time: 12:00pm-1:30pm, Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5)
Microsoft Teams Need help?
Phone conference ID: 505 996 741#
Join on a video conferencing device
Tenant key: 1013...@teams-us.bjn.vc
Video ID: 118 970 311 8
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Hi Sebastien,
Thanks for continuing to help flesh this all out and
move things forward. Please see my comments inline
below in red demarked by [C4A].
Take care.
Jim
From: Sebastien Riou <sebasti...@pqshield.com>
Sent: December 1, 2024 4:31 AM
To: Jim Goodman <ji...@crypto4a.com>
Cc: Mike Ounsworth <Mike.Ou...@entrust.com>; dustin...@nist.gov <dustin...@nist.gov>; pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] RE: [pqc-forum] Re: Update on SP 800-208
Hi,
Thanks Jim for listing the requirements again and adding a few more. I rewrite them here with the enhanced version of C5c from Mike. I add a few more prefixed with "P":
[C4A] We don’t think MUST is warranted here, this is at best a SHOULD as we’re always striving to reduce complexity so it’s more of a best practices effort. Similarly, this should also include the setup and maintenance of a complex system, replacing procedural steps with complex components and control isn’t an obvious improvement due to the unforeseen complications that can arise by adopting this approach. Over time, as the kinks get worked out, and experience/expertise is gathered, the complexity may diminish, but it doesn’t come for free. Mike’s C5c was intended to address this concern, and we think it is sufficient for this purpose.
[C4A] It’s not clear why this is a MUST. It is at best a SHOULD as over provisioning can easily address this issue without any significant cost both in terms of size and verification time in the vast majority of use cases.
[C4A] Another SHOULD rather than a MUST, though I believe all proposals work fine with this requirement (and indeed, nothing proposed by anyone so far changes anything from the verifier’s perspective).
Some remarks/questions:
[C4A] We’ll defer to NIST and the CMVP to dictate what constitutes a valid device as at the end of the day they own the validation process. However, regardless of what devices they ultimately deem valid, we’d argue that the real requirement here is that these devices MUST use quantum-safe roots of trust to protect their firmware updating process and services. If you’re going to be relying on a device to provide quantum-safe signatures then it too should be built upon quantum-safe principles trust lest the signatures it generates be akin to steel doors on glass houses since a quantum-capable attacker could compromise the underlying firmware of the device and its behaviour. That kind of defeats the purpose of generating quantum-safe signatures, no?
[C4A] We feel this is an unnecessary constraint, and have customers who have invested in an XMSS-based infrastructure due to their preference for its stated security assumptions. We don’t want to get dragged into the LMS vs. XMSS holy war, but think that given they have similar state management problems, we should NOT limit the scope without a good reason. Customers can make their own decisions as to what algorithm they prefer, and given the use case focus on FW signing I don’t think interoperability is a concern as a system builder will tailor their implementation to verify whatever algorithm they deem worthy. As an HSM vendor we strive to provide a full suite of capabilities to our customers, PQShield, or anyone else for that matter, is of course is free to limit their customers’ options if they think that makes sense to them.
[C4A] We think the meaning is pretty self-evident in the title “air-gapped” as in no external connection. See my earlier comment regarding striving to deliver a full suite of capabilities to our customers, several of which place a very high value on this ability to operate offline in a physically-secure fashion. Hence, they desire to deploy their HSMs in an environment where connectivity is limited (be it on purpose as per a desired security posture, or just due to unreliable connectivity), and they want to ensure that the device can still deliver the intended functionality (e.g., signing a FW image in the often-used example discussed here). This will lead to serious issues if we start placing dependencies like the availability of secure time sources, or access to an arbitration device to dictate whether or not a device can deliver the service it was intended for. A device that cannot operate in a standalone mode after being provisioned increases the potential attack surface, and becomes an easy target for denial-of-service.
[C4A] Once again, we choose to not take that decision out of our customers hands. If they want to generate signatures concurrently then we want to provide that option, and don’t think this arbitrary constraint/interpretation is warranted.
[C4A] That sounds like a reasonable mapping (but will defer to NIST/CMVP to dictate what devices are considered suitable options), but our fear is that the multi-party counting scheme won’t scale very well and is a rather complex solution with single-points of failure. So while it may meet C5a, we’re not sure it maps well to C5b-C5e.
[C4A] Requirements can indeed be impossible to completely satisfy, but the intent is to ensure we provide a reasonable set that allows us to make good decisions while still trying to cover a reasonable variety of customers’ needs. All of our stated requirements were based on actual customer requirements collected over numerous engagements to build S-HBS infrastructure. We’re still not sure we see the importance of P3 as being as high as you seem to be positioning things, but we agree that we should be able to find a solution that makes everyone happy (or at the very least a lot less unhappy than they currently are! ;->).
[C4A] Let’s not forget that all HSM installations begin with a key ceremony that is an inherently manual process, that is 100% founded on the notion of “humans doing the right thing” in order to ensure auditability of the foundational security of a new root of trust. That being said, we agree that automated solutions have their advantages, but manual ones do too, and both also have their disadvantages. While a manual solution might require humans to do the right thing, an automated one does too given the Herculean efforts required to validate the automation to ensure the devices are doing what was intended in the face of possibly unexpected (and potentially malicious) inputs. Ultimately, manual solutions have the advantage of being much less expensive, and typically much simpler from an implementation perspective. Automated solutions benefit from not requiring human input during normal operation, but they usually require far more complex setup procedures, more complicated software (which increases your attack surface and system complexity), and more complex infrastructures. Ultimately though, customers have different use cases and different requirements, so having flexible solutions that can cover different customers’ use cases is better than taking the choice out of their hands and forcing trade-offs onto those customers. Lastly, sectorization does lend itself to automation in the form of managing the unprovisioned sectors and ensuring no replication or re-provisioning of a sector (e.g., the Key Coordinator concept we presented at the March SP800-208 meeting at NCCoE). It’s just that it doesn’t require automation to work if the system operator decides that the additional complexity isn’t warranted given their comfort level with using manual processes. At the end of the day it’s their decision to make so we try to provide a solution that can work in either scenario.
Hi,
If I could choose, I would much rather see NIST prioritizing additional parameter sets for the general purpose SLH-DSA algorithm. As NIST writes in 800-208, LMS and XMSS are not suitable for general use.
In the Norwegian National Security Authority Cryptographic Recommendations for 2024, LMS and XMSS are not even approved. I agree with the Norwegian recommendations. I see standalone SLH-DSA and hybridized ML-DSA as the two options. LMS and XMSS was just a temporary step before FIPS 204 and FIPS 205.
Cheers,
John
Sebastien Riou
Director, Product Security Architecture
PQShield Ltd
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>>Backups of stateful HBS are dangerous, as they can lead to reuse of one-time keys
What happens if SP 800-208 was modified to incorporate a strong unique identity – known only to the HSM itself?
From: 'dustin...@nist.gov' via pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Sent: February 7, 2025 11:48 AM
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Cc: dustin...@nist.gov <dustin...@nist.gov>
Subject: [pqc-forum] Re: Update on SP 800-208
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On second thought. Don’t change SP 800-208. The HSM backup and restore process needs to incorporate a scheme to prevent reuse of one-time keys.
From: Brent Kimberley
Sent: February 7, 2025 1:11 PM
To: dustin...@nist.gov <dustin...@nist.gov>; pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
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As a follow-on from this meeting, are there any updates from NIST CTG on when the community might expect an initial public draft for an updated SP 800-208?
Any guidance is much appreciated as we’re increasingly getting asked questions about facilitating a transfer capability (as proposed by John) in FIPS 140 certified configurations of our HSM. Critical to unlocking that, is understanding timelines linked to any future SP 800-208 updates that might be in flight.
Thanks,
Graham.
From: 'dustin...@nist.gov' via pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Sent: Friday, February 7, 2025 4:48 PM
To: pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Cc: dustin...@nist.gov <dustin...@nist.gov>
Subject: [pqc-forum] Re: Update on SP 800-208
John Kelsey has prepared a short document that he'd like to share with those who will be attending the meeting at the NCCoE to continue the discussion on SP 800-208 (stateful hash based signatures). It is attached. It would be helpful to read before the meeting. Thanks!
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Are there any updates from NIST on the open question below?
This remains an open topic for us as a cryptographic module vendor, as we have customers committed to deploying LMS using our HSM for code signing. In particular, they are interested in timelines for firmware updates that would enable options to transfer sections of generated keys between devices as a FIPS 140-3 approved service.
Graham.
From: COSTA Graham
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2025 7:20 PM
To: dustin...@nist.gov <dustin...@nist.gov>; pqc-forum <pqc-...@list.nist.gov>
Hello Graham,
SP800-208 is early in its revision cycle, it will likely be a couple months
before an initial public draft becomes available. We are attempting a small
revision focused on adding provisioning to SP800-208, and are in the phase of
deciding the exact details and requirements.
-Hamilton Silberg
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