On 2022-07-11, at 10:37, John Mattsson 
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> >If LAKE presumes using "kid" as a hint only,
>  
> LAKE presumes nothing more than COSE. This discussion in not really related 
> to LAKE at all. COSE presumes that "kid" can be used as a hint only.

That is not a presumption.  This is about a lack of presumptions.

The right way to say this would be:

COSE puts no requirements on the mechanism a recipient uses to obtain the 
appropriate key to process the COSE data item.
COSE does provides a kid header field that can be used by such a mechanism; no 
specific semantics are ascribed to this field by COSE itself.

Anders: your statement

> h'01' may very well mean the second key associated with the specific 
> sender/producer, if we are talking about signatures.

reveals that you do make a couple of presumptions here:

— sender and receiver have an agreed, shared way to enumerate senders/producers
— a COSE data item always comes with a context that makes clear who that 
sender/producer is (data in the item, data in the context that somehow is 
securely bound to the item)
— senders/producers have a way of maintaining their key space with unique key 
ids (not at all a given over time and space!)
— recipients’ authorization policies are happy to rely on all this
— (implicit, but often comes with the above): that sender/producer identity 
actually means something for the security semantics.

COSE makes none of these presumptions.  You are welcome to define a protocol on 
top of COSE that has all these properties; you appear to believe that is the 
only way to do a system design.  These presumptions come with a cost, so  
everybody agrees; we need to keep it possible to define protocols using COSE 
that do not have them.

Grüße, Carsten

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