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Re: [openpgp] German BSI, PQC for OpenPGP in Thunderbird,

2021-06-28 09:26:50
On Mon 2021-06-28 12:36:17 +0200, Justus Winter wrote:
I think we should revisit the way we store cryptographic artifacts in
OpenPGP.  Unfortunately, neither SOS nor SBS address the issue of
potentially large PQ artifacts.

As the person who coined "SBS", I want to note that it is *not* intended
to be a design that will work for future algorithms.  It's merely a
handle to describe the particular idiosyncratic structure used in some
cases already for 25519.

While SBS is "MPI-like", we already do have non-MPI-like data structures
stuffed into the "algorithm-specific" parts of some key material: in
particular, the ECC OID is encoded with a single octet length, which
means it cannot be parsed correctly by any implementation that is
ECC-ignorant but blindly expects to extract a series of MPI-like
objects from a public key packet.

For future algorithms (including anything PQ) i'd hope that the future
spec would explicitly declare a distinct data structure for the
algorithm as necessary.  I don't think we need a generic data structure
format given the range of possible requirements.

       --dkg

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