Additive Cryptography

“More primitives == more safety.”

— someone, probably, in a migration meeting

Additive Cryptography is an April 1 parody IRTF/CFRG-style draft exploring what happens if we take hybrid migration logic to its natural thermodynamic conclusion: nothing is ever removed, everything is wrapped, and progress is measured in accumulation.

Instead of replacing algorithms, we add them. Instead of negotiating fewer things, we negotiate everything. Instead of deprecating, we reclassify as historical confidence points.

The result is a protocol that grows monotonically in:

• Confidence
• Ceremony
• Packet size
• Budget

Growth is mandatory.

⚠️ Warning ⚠️

This project is a parody construction. It is not reviewed for real-world security and is not for production use.

If you deploy this, you have misunderstood the document. If you deploy this and it works, please add another algorithm.

What This Is Really About

This draft is gentle satire about:

• Migration fatigue
• “Just run both” reasoning
• Transition risk anxiety
• Governance paralysis
• The emotional attachment to cryptographic primitives

It does not mock hybrid migration. It simply asks what happens if we refuse to ever stop.

Draft Artifacts

Build and lint the draft, then publish reader artifacts into docs/:

./build-draft.sh

This generates:

• docs/index.html (entrypoint)
• docs/draft-irtf-cfrg-additive-cryptography-00.html
• docs/draft-irtf-cfrg-additive-cryptography-00.xml
• docs/draft-irtf-cfrg-additive-cryptography-00.txt
• docs/draft-irtf-cfrg-additive-cryptography-00.pdf (when xml2rfc PDF dependencies are installed)

Manual flow:

1. Run the script.
2. Review the output.
3. Commit the docs/ updates.
4. Do not remove anything.

Design Principles

• Replacement is risk.
• Decisions are subtractive.
• Removal is morally equivalent to downgrade.
• History is additive.

Status

Confidence Points: Aspirational.

This repository will continue to grow.