Cloudflare aims to provision Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) with ML-DSA signatures for the millions of Cloudflare-proxied domains we manage classical certificates for today. But ML-DSA public keys and signatures are far larger than their classical counterparts, and naïvely storing MTCs would overwhelm the capacity budgets of the globally-distributed key-value store backing our control plane. Fortunately, the properties of MTCs (e.g., batch signing) open up optimizations and deduplication that are not possible with directly-signed certificates, and make our MTC deployment feasible. We’ll walk through the optimizations we apply, share the size savings, and offer practical lessons for anyone planning to operate MTCs at scale.
Speaker
Luke Valenta is a research engineer primarily focused on building secure, reliable systems and measuring the Internet. He is broadly interested in computer security, network and protocol measurement, applied cryptography, privacy, and distributed systems.
