Original text:
12.3. A new group can be formed from a subset of an existing group's <del> members, using the same parameters as the old group.  The creator of the group indicates this situation by including a PreSharedKey of type "resumption" with usage "branch" in the Welcome message that creates the branched subgroup. </del>  A client receiving a Welcome including a PreSharedKey of type "resumption" with usage "branch" MUST verify that the new group

Reviewer comments:
Based on , it should be made explicit that sub-group branching requires a fresh key package for each member. I think there is still a conflict of wording here that I would like feedback on because of this line (which is what triggered me thinking there was a bug)
Thanks for the PR and thanks for digging into this. I think what the sentence is meant to say is that the receiver MUST check that the members of the new group are a subset of the members of the old group at that specific epoch. Since we're using new LeafNodes in the new group and we don't have a fixed notion of identity (at least not within MLS), we have to refer to the application/the AS to ensure that the identity expressed by the credential in each LeafNode in the subgroup has a corresponding identity (i.e. one that represents the same party) expressed by a credential in a LeafNode in the original group. Maybe something like: This leaves the possibility of a collision, where the identifiers in a given leaf in the new group would be valid updates to more than one member in the old group. This should probably be forbidden in general, although outside of this case it's not really a problem, because updates are always specific to one leaf. Alternatively, we could somehow include LeafNodeRefs that specifically indicate which member represents which other member. Or just leave it up to the application to sort this all out.
Curious what you think about saying the the credential has to be equal? We can determine equality of the credential itself just by doing tls serialization.
Sure, requiring the credential to be exactly the same would be a simple way to figure out if it's the same party in both groups. However, I can imagine that some applications will want distinct credentials for each group. If we mandate that credentials are the same, this would force the application to use the same credential in every key package/LeafNode. Since subgroups can potentially be branched at any time and in any group, all key packages that a party publishes then have to have the same credential as all of the groups that party is in, so another party branching a subgroup can get hold of a KeyPackage with the same credential as the group the subgroup is branched off of. Personally, I'd prefer asking the application to check that the identities of the new group are a subset of the identities of the original group.
I can see that being an issue, although I am somewhat worried about us not being opinionated in same way about how to determine equality here, mainly because of interop type things. We punt on how to validate the credentials as well in general so I guess this is in line with prior decisions
Hey NAME and NAME check the change I just posted. NAME and I put that together, it's a bit tough to get a generic definition of equivalency.
There is currently a logical flaw in the subgroup branching flow. In order to branch, you need to compose a message . A Welcome message includes which is defined as follows: The problem with this is that the field of type cannot be made for existing members of the group because the leaf nodes are now types. is now only used to add new members to the group, so we can't reuse this for sub group initialization.
I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you suggesting when branching a group off of another group, one re-uses the leaves of the old group? If so, that's not how it's meant to work. The new group created in the process of subgroup branching should be independent from the "parent" group safe for the PSK, which all member have to provide upon creation of the group. In fact one should never use the same key material in the leaves of multiple groups except when the supply of key packages that a party provides via the DS is exhausted (see Section 17.4).
That was part of my question. When there were key packages in the leaves, you theoretically could fork the group from a given point in time and reuse the current tree, but I wasn't sure if that was a proper solution or not. Sounds like it isn't, but either way, I think there should be clarification in the document about this. Let me write up a quick PR on it.
NAME opened URL Would like your feedback there. We have conflicting wording here as well. What threw me off in the first place was the line indicating that LeafNodes should be the same in the sub-group, and if we are fetching new key packages they will not be the same.
NAME Konrad, could you safely derive new keys for the members of the subgroup instead? If so, that would be an enormous increase in efficiency and (especially in the federated case) make group creation timing consistent enough to do dynamically.
NAME Nice idea! But it's tricky, since we're dealing with public key pairs that the creator of the new group doesn't know the private keys for. If we were only using HPKE schemes that support updateable public key encryption, the creator of the new group could indeed update the key in the existing group and send the "delta" encrypted to each corresponding member (which would still represent an overhead, but we might be able to optimize this somehow). This is similar to the RTreeKEM mechanism that NAME et al. proposed at some point. To go all the way here, we'd have to do the same for the public key material in the credentials as well, which is not something we had considered before. It would be a new primitive, something like an updateable signature scheme? Probably something to consider for HPKE/MLS 2.0. We could also allow the re-use of LeadNodes for this particular case. It would be the simpler solution and I don't think it would be catastrophic, since we have to assume that LeafNode (or KeyPackage) key material is re-used in the "last resort" scenario anyway, but this would definitely be something we should discuss on the mailing list, as it would break a pretty basic assumption we've made until now.
Just catching up on this. NAME nice catch here. It seems like we have two options here: Require new KeyPackages (as in ) Invent some way to make a new group based on LeafNodes alone I probably agree that we should do (1) in the short term, but (2) also has some appeal -- it doesn't feel right to require new KeyPackages for folks you're already in touch with -- despite it probably being more spec text. So here's a sketch of (2) in the interest of completeness. Suppose we defined a message of the following form: ... which would pretty closely parallel to Commit. You would send it in MLSMessage and require a in MLSMessageAuth. Where Commit instructs the recipient to create a new epoch from the current one within the same group, Branch would instruct the recipient to create a new epoch that is the first epoch of a new group. In both cases, you would form an epoch / GroupContext as specified, then use the to ratchet into the new epoch. I'm pretty sure that would work and have the expected security properties, though obviously formal analysis would be appreciated. The main awkardness that occurs to me is that any members joining after the branch would have to provide new key packages. And obviously, it would require a fair bit more spec text. All that said, though, the exercise of working all that out has increased my impression that we should do (1) for now. If we want something like (2) later, it can be done pretty cleanly in an extension.
Fixed by
Well put!

Revised text:
12.3. A new group can be formed from a subset of an existing group's  <ins> members, using the same parameters as the old group. A member can create a sub-group by performing the following steps: Determine a subset of existing members that should be a part of the sub-group. Create a new tree for the sub-group by fetching a new KeyPackage for each existing member that should be included in the sub-group. Create a Welcome message that includes a PreSharedKey of type "resumption" with usage "branch". </ins> A client receiving a Welcome including a PreSharedKey of type "resumption" with usage "branch" MUST verify that the new group