the IETF TLS working group has limited time/energy. He has been (very successfully) taking up a good deal of this with very annoying procedural techniques (and his most recent move, spreading falsehoods regarding an RFC then asking people to brigade a vote on the RFC). Explicitly, this slows down standards, which delays the PQ transition.

Again explicitly, this is not the main RFC for PQ TLS, which details a hybrid construction. This is an RFC with "recommended to implement = N" marked about how to do PQ TLS 1.3 in environemnts where hybrids are too expensive, for example hardware where it necessitates both a SHA2 and SHA3 impl.

> This is an RFC with "recommended to implement = N" marked about how to do PQ TLS 1.3 in environemnts where hybrids are too expensive

I think the argument boils down to this, yeah.

I am not a cryptographer, nor I’m participating in IETF (yet :), but he does make a good argument on why sticking with a hybrid for the time being makes sense (in between of all the NSA tinfoil hat stuff). And from an outsider point of view, publishing this as an RFC would somewhat legitimize using ML-KEM alone even though it’s marked as Recommended: N. (I would rather prefer waiting until we can publish it as Recommended: Y instead!)

If there are environments where ECDHE-MLKEM is really that much more expensive than ML-KEM alone, could we figure out another hybrid construction instead? E.g. one that only uses SHA3, if that’s the problem.

if no one should implement it, why standardize it?