CECPQ1 was the experiment in post-quantum confidentiality that my colleague, Matt Braithwaite, and I ran in 2016. It's about time for CECPQ2.

I've previously written about the experiments in Chrome which lead to the conclusion that structured lattices were likely the best area in which to look for a new key-exchange mechanism at the current time. Thanks to the NIST process we now have a great many candidates to choose from in that space. While this is obviously welcome, it also presents a problem: the fitness space of structured lattices looks quite flat so there's no obviously correct choice. Would you like keys to be products (RLWE) or quotients (NTRU; much slower key-gen, but subsequent operations are faster; older, more studied)? Do you want the ring to be NTT-friendly (fast multiplication, but more structure), or to have just a power-of-two modulus (easy reduction), or to have as little structure as possible? What noise profile and failure probability? Smart people can reasonably end up with different preferences.

This begs the question of why do CECPQ2 now at all? In some number of years NIST will eventually whittle down the field and write standards. Adrian Stanger of the NSA said at CRYPTO this year that the NSA is looking to publish post-quantum standards around 2024, based on NIST's output. (And even said that they would be pure-PQ algorithms, not combined with an elliptic-curve operation as a safeguard.) So if we wait five years things are likely to be a lot more settled.

Firstly, you might not be happy with the idea of waiting five years if you believe Michele Mosca's estimate of a one sixth chance of a large quantum computer in ten years. More practically, as we sail past the two year mark of trying to deploy TLS 1.3, another concern is that if we don't exercise this ability now we might find it extremely difficult to deploy any eventual design.

TLS 1.3 should have been straightforward to deploy because the TLS specs make accommodations for future changes. However, in practice, we had to run a series of large-scale experiments to measure what patterns of bytes would actually weave through all the bugs in the TLS ecosystem. TLS 1.3 now has several oddities in the wire-format that exist purely to confuse various network intermediaries into working. Even after that, we're still dealing with issues. Gallingly, because we delayed our server deployment in order to ease the client deployment, we're now having to work around bugs in TLS 1.3 client implementations that wouldn't have been able to get established had we quickly and fully enabled it.

The internet is very large and it's not getting any easier to steer. So it seems dangerous to assume that we can wait for a post-quantum standard and then deploy it. Any CECPQ2 is probably, in the long-term, destined to be replaced. But by starting the deployment now it can hopefully make that replacement viable by exercising things like larger TLS messages. Also, some practical experience might yield valuable lessons when it comes to choosing a standard. If the IETF had published the TLS 1.3 RFC before feedback from deployment, it would have been a divisive mess.

CECPQ2 Details

At the time of CECPQ1, the idea of running both a post-quantum and elliptic-curve primitive concurrently (to ensure that even if the post-quantum part was useless, at least the security wasn't worse than before) wasn't universally embraced. But we thought it important enough to highlight the idea in the name: combined elliptic-curve and post-quantum. It's a much more widely accepted idea now and still makes sense, and the best choice of elliptic-curve primitive hasn't changed, so CECPQ2 is still a combination with X25519.

As for the post-quantum part, it's based on the HRSS scheme of Hülsing, Rijneveld, Schanck, and Schwabe. This is an instantiation of NTRU, the patent for which has expired since we did CECPQ1. (The list of people who've had a hand in NTRU is quite long. See the Wikipedia page for a start.)

Last year Saito, Xagawa, and Yamakawa (SXY) published a derivative of HRSS with a tight, QROM-proof of CCA2 security from an assumption close to CPA security. It requires changes (that slow HRSS down a little), but HRSS+SXY is currently the basis of CECPQ2. Since HRSS+SXY no longer requires an XOF, SHAKE-128 has been replaced with SHA-256.

Having said that it's hard to choose in the structured lattice space, obviously HRSS is a choice and there were motivations behind it:

CCA2-security is worthwhile, even though TLS can do without. CCA2 security roughly means that a private-key can be used multiple times. The step down is CPA security, where a private-key is only safe to use once. NewHope, used in CECPQ1, was only CPA secure and that worked for TLS since its confidentiality keys are ephemeral. But CPA vs CCA security is a subtle and dangerous distinction, and if we're going to invest in a post-quantum primitive, better it not be fragile. Avoiding decryption failures is attractive. Not because we're worried about unit tests failing (hardware errors set a noise floor for that anyway), but because the analysis of failure probabilities is complex. In the time since we picked HRSS, a paper has appeared chipping away at these failures. Eliminating them simplifies things. Schemes with a quotient-style key (like HRSS) will probably have faster encap/decap operations at the cost of much slower key-generation. Since there will be many uses outside TLS where keys can be reused, this is interesting as long as the key-generation speed is still reasonable for TLS. NTRU has a long history. In a space without a clear winner, that's a small positive.

CECPQ2 will be moving slowly: It depends on TLS 1.3 and, as mentioned, 1.3 is taking a while. The larger messages may take some time to deploy if we hit middlebox- or server-compatibility issues. Also the messages are currently too large to include in QUIC. But working though these problems now is a lot of the reason for doing CECPQ2—to ensure that post-quantum TLS remains feasible.

Lastly, I want to highlight that this only addresses confidentiality, not authenticity. Confidentiality is more pressing since it can be broken retrospectively, but it's also much easier to deal with in TLS because it's negotiated independently for every connection. Post-quantum authenticity will be entangled with the certificate and CA ecosystem and thus will be significantly more work.