[ Speaking with no hats ]

I think this text is an improvement to what's there today.


- m&m
Matthew A. Miller

> On Sep 10, 2020, at 9:09 PM, Jim Schaad <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Below is the text that I am proposing for COSE Struct.  The changes are all
> in the last 5 paragraphs.
> 
> Jim
> 
> 
> 
>   The second scheme is signature with message recovery (an example of
>   such an algorithm is [PVSig]).  In this scheme, the message content
>   is processed, but part of it is included in the signature.  Moving
>   bytes of the message content into the signature allows for smaller
>   signatures; the signature size is still potentially large, but the
>   message content has shrunk.  This has implications for systems
>   implementing these algorithms and for applications that use them.
>   The first is that the message content is not fully available until
>   after a signature has been validated.  Until that point, the part of
>   the message contained inside of the signature is unrecoverable.  The
>   second is that the security analysis of the strength of the signature
>   is very much based on the structure of the message content.  Messages
>   that are highly predictable require additional randomness to be
>   supplied as part of the signature process.  In the worst case, it
>   becomes the same as doing a signature with appendix.  Finally, in the
>   event that multiple signatures are applied to a message, all of the
>   signature algorithms are going to be required to consume the same
>   number of bytes of message content.  This means that the mixing of
>   the different schemes in a single message is not supported, and if a
>   recovery signature scheme is used, then the same amount of content
>   needs to be consumed by all of the signatures.
> 
>   The signature functions for this scheme are:
> 
>   signature, message sent = Sign(message content, key)
> 
>   valid, message content = Verification(message sent, key, signature)
> 
>   Since there have not yet been any message recovery signature
>   algorithms formally defined for COSE, it is very likely that there
>   are going to be issues that arise that have not been anticipated yet.
>   There are some issues that have been identified that the first such
>   algorithm is going to need to make decisions about.  These issues
>   include:
> 
>   *  The message content being signed is not the same as the message
>      content that is transported.  This is because we build a larger
>      message for the signature process.  The number of bytes contained
>      in the message may exceed the number of bytes of payload, but not
>      the number of bytes signed.  This may lead to privacy
>      considerations if, for example, the application external data
>      contains confidential information.
> 
>   *  There may be difficulties in determining where the recovered
>      message matches up with the to be signed value because bytes other
>      than the payload are included in the recovered message.  One
>      possible option would be to create a padding scheme to prevent
>      that.
> 
>   *  Not all of these signature algorithms take the recovered bytes
>      from the end of the message.  If the recovered bytes are taken
>      from the start of the message then, by default, none of the
>      signature payload may be included in the message recovery data.
>      One possible option to deal with this is to reverse the to-be-
>      signed data in the event that bytes are taken from the start
>      rather than end of the message.
> 
>   Signature algorithms are used with the COSE_Signature and COSE_Sign1
>   structures.  At this time, only signatures with appendixes are
>   defined for use with COSE; however, considerable interest has been
>   expressed in using a signature with message recovery algorithm due to
>   the effective size reduction that is possible.
> 
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