I support adoption of the draft

On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 10:02 AM Ilari Liusvaara <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 10:43:23AM +0100, Ivaylo Petrov wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > This note starts a three-week call for adoption for *Split Signing
> > Algorithms for COSE*
> >
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lundberg-cose-two-party-signing-algs/
> .
> > Please indicate here *by Monday, April 13, 2026* whether you are in favor
> > of adoption or not, and the reasons for your position.
>
> No. I do not think this is a good way to solve the underlying problem,
> which is signing data too large to transfer to the signer.
>
> What I think should be done is adding a mechanism to COSE (and maybe
> also JOSE) that hashed the payload before signing. Note that this is
> subtly different from what hash envelope does (uses a hash to represent
> some content).
>
>
> Then to the draft itself:
>
> The approach used by this draft seems mostly limited to ECDSA, as:
>
>  - Ed25519ph and Ed448ph are very poorly supported.
>  - Hash-(ML|FN|SLH)-DSA is an operational disater. And likely
>    poorly supported too.
>  - For ML-DSA, there is signmu, but it is unclear if it would be
>    used (LAMPS WG did go with ML-DSA signmu to support signing
>    large amounts of data with ML-DSA).
>
>
> Then there are issues with the way *-split algorithms are specified.
> These codepoints are not reserved, but are not interoperable nor even
> usefully constrain the implementation.
>
> The draft says that the digest is "usually" transmitted in the data
> to be signed argument. What does that mean?
>
> Or that *-split algorithms can appear in "COSE structures". What COSE
> structures?
>
> Then COSE_Sign_args is not enough for signature request (it is missing
> the digest), and there is no structure that contains it.
>
> And why would verifier know anything about *-split algorithms other
> than to reject the whole message as malformed?
>
>
> Suggest something along following lines:
>
> - *-split algorithms MUST NOT appear in COSE signatures nor keys.
>   Such algorithms MUST either be treated as unknown, or the whole
>   message rejected as malformed.
>
> - Replace COSE_Sign_args with something like three-element array:
>
>   * alg: int/tstr
>   * hash: bstr
>   * extra_args: { label => value }
>
>
>
>
> -Ilari
>
> _______________________________________________
> COSE mailing list -- [email protected]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
>


-- 

Brent Zundel
Standards Architect | Yubico <http://www.yubico.com/>
_______________________________________________
COSE mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]

Reply via email to