Hi all,

I'm reading draft-ietf-tls-hybrid-design-16 and would like clarification on the 
claim in Section 6:

"Under the assumption that shared secrets are fixed length once the combination 
is fixed, the construction from Section 3.3 corresponds to the dual-PRF 
combiner of [BINDEL] which is shown to preserve security under the assumption 
that the hash function is a dual-PRF."

Section 3.3 uses a concatenation-based combined secret that feeds directly into 
the TLS 1.3 key schedule, i.e.:
concatenated_shared_secret = ss1 || ss2
HandshakeSecret = HKDF-Extract(derived_secret, concatenated_shared_secret)

My concern is about the meaning of "corresponds to the dual-PRF combiner of 
[BINDEL]". Bindel's dual-PRF combiner is typically expressed as 
PRF(dPRF(k1,k2), c1||c2), where dPRF is the dual PRF function. By contrast, in 
the TLS construction above, both secrets are placed into the IKM/message input 
of HKDF-Extract, while the HKDF-Extract salt is derived_secret. Formally, if 
HKDF-Extract is viewed as dPRF, this looks like dPRF(derived_secret, ss1||ss2) 
rather than dPRF(ss1,ss2).

Could you clarify what exact correspondence is intended here? How does the 
security of dPRF(k1,k2) (from Bindel paper) imply the security of 
dPRF(derived_secret, ss1||ss2)?
[1] Nina Bindel, Jacqueline Brendel, Marc Fischlin, Brian Goncalves, and 
Douglas Stebila, "Hybrid Key Encapsulation Mechanisms and Authenticated Key 
Exchange," 2018, 2018/903. Available: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/903

Thanks,

Jiawei

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