CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (cose)

CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (cose)

WG Name CBOR Object Signing and Encryption
Acronym cose
Area Security Area (sec)
State Active
Charter charter-ietf-cose-03 Approved
Document dependencies
Additional resources Issue tracker, Wiki, Zulip Stream
Personnel Chairs Ivaylo Petrov, Michael B. Jones
Area Director Paul Wouters
Mailing list Address cose@ietf.org
To subscribe https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/cose
Archive https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/cose/
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/cose

Charter for Working Group

CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE, RFC 8152) describes how to
create and process signatures, message authentication codes, and
encryption using Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR, RFC 7049)
for serialization. COSE additionally describes a representation for
cryptographic keys.

COSE has been picked up and is being used both by a number of groups
within the IETF (i.e., ACE, CORE, ANIMA, 6TiSCH and SUIT) and
outside the IETF (i.e., W3C and FIDO). There are a number of
implementations, both open source and private, now in existence.
The specification has advanced to STD status.

The COSE working group will deal with two types of documents going forward:

  1. Documents that describe the use of cryptographic algorithms in COSE.
  2. Documents which describe additional attributes for COSE.

The WG will evaluate, and potentially adopt, documents dealing with algorithms
that would fit the criteria of being IETF consensus algorithms.
Potential candidates would include those algorithms that have been evaluated by
the CFRG and algorithms which have gone through a public review and evaluation
process such as was done for the NIST SHA-3 algorithms.
Potential candidates would not include national-standards-based algorithms
that have not gone through a similar public review process.

The WG will produce documents for new attributes only if they are in the
list of deliverables below. A re-charter will be required to expand that list.
The WG is expected as part of normal processing to review and comment on
attributes that are not in charter but are of general public interest.

Key management and binding of keys to identities are out of scope for
the working group. The COSE WG will not innovate in terms of
cryptography. The specification of algorithms in COSE is limited to
those in RFCs, active CFRG or IETF WG documents, or algorithms which
have been positively reviewed by the CFRG.

The working group will coordinate its progress with the ACE, SUIT and
CORE working groups to ensure that it is fulfilling the needs of
these constituencies to the extent relevant to their work. Other
groups may be added to this list as the set of use cases is expanded,
in consultation with the responsible Area Director.

The WG currently has two work items:

  1. One or more documents describing the proper use of algorithms.
    These algorithms must meet the requirements outlined above.

  2. A CBOR encoding of the certificate profile defined in RFC 5280.
    It is expected that the encoding works with RFC 7925 and takes into
    consideration any updates in draft-ietf-uta-tls13-iot-profile-00. The
    encoding may also include other important IoT certificate profiles like IEEE
    802.1AR.
    The main objective is to define a method of encoding current X.509
    certificates that meet a specific profile into a smaller format. This encoding
    is invertible, so they can be expanded and normal X.509 certificate processing
    can be used. The data structures used for such encoding of X.509 certificates are
    expected to produce a compact encoding for certificate information, and are
    not necessarily tied specifically to X.509 certificates. Accordingly, a
    secondary objective is to reuse these data structures to produce a natively
    signed CBOR certificate encoding; such a structure is relevant in situations
    where DER parsing and the machinery to convert between CBOR and DER encodings
    are unnecessary overhead, such as embedded implementations. The possibility
    of a joint certificate artifact, conveyed in CBOR encoding but including
    signatures over both the CBOR and DER encodings, may be explored. CBOR
    encoding of other X.509 certificate related data structures may also be
    specified to support relevant functions such as revocation: Certificate
    Revocation List (RFC 5280) or OSCP Request/Response (RFC 6960); or certificate
    enrollment: Certificate Signing Request (RFC 2986).
    draft-mattsson-cose-cbor-cert-compress is expected to be a good starting point
    for this work. The working group will collaborate and coordinate with other
    IETF WGs such as TLS, UTA, LAKE to understand and validate the requirements
    and solution.

Milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Dec 2021 Submit draft for compressed certificate encoding to the IESG for publication draft-mattsson-cose-cbor-cert-compress
Jun 2021 Adopt draft for compressed certificate encoding as a Working Group item draft-mattsson-cose-cbor-cert-compress