Hi CBOR/COSE enthusiasts!

During the design of the (in)famous Embedded Signature specification and associated implementations 
[*}, I stumbled over the type of the COSE algorithm ID, in CDDL defined as "tstr/int".  A 
problem is that my CBOR implementations do not really support "int" since this 
effectively translates to a 65-bit integer.  A quick consultation with the associated IANA 
Designated Expert (Carsten Bormann) revealed that IANA would not accept COSE algorithm IDs even 
above the JavaScript 53-bit level.

A similar issue arose with "iat" in CWT.  Although it might be cool with 
timestamps spanning billions of years forward and backward, this is not particularly 
interoperable with current time APIs.

To cope with such issues, my primary project (creating a cross-platform profile for 
CBOR), defines a set of "standardized", presumably portable, CBOR protocol 
primitives: 
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rundgren-cbor-core-24.html#name-protocol-primitives

For the COSE-derived solutions, the type of "alg" was set to int32 while limiting "iat" to the 
range defined by the I-D: 0 ("1970‑01‑01T00:00:00Z") to 253402300799 ("9999‑12‑31T23:59:59Z").

Anders

*] https://test.webpki.org/csf-lab

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