Re: IMA and PQC

Stefan Berger
2026-02-25T14:26:12Z

On 2/3/26 8:32 AM, Coiby Xu wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 09:31:26PM +0100, Johannes Wiesböck wrote:
>> Hi all,
>
> Hi Johannes,
>
>>
>> we conducted an evaluation regarding PQC use in IMA last year (see [1]
>> for all
>> details) where we also considered the interplay of different PQC
>> signatures and
>> file systems (ext4, btrfs, XFS, f2fs).
>
> Thanks for sharing this comprehensive study! There are many nuances in
> this research paper!
>
>>
>> Coiby Xu <coxu@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> According to my experiments done so far, for verification speed,
>>> ML-DSA-65 is consistently faster than ECDSA P-384 which is used by
>>> current CentOS/RHEL to sign files in a package.
>>
>> Regarding performance, similar to Coiby, we found that all variants of
>> ML-DSA
>> consistently outperformed ECDSA P-256.
>
> Glad to know ML-DSA is also faster than ECDSA P-256!

To avoid duplicate work: Is either one of you planning on writing
patches for IMA to use ML-DSA and convert the current ML-DSA to also
support HashML? I had done the work on this before and could dig out the
patches again...

Stefan