On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 09:09:14PM -0400, Brian Sipos wrote:
> Ilari,
> Thank you, I now better understand the relationship to RFC 9180. It might
> be helpful to give an aside somewhere (intro section?) to explain that the
> mechanism of this document is not compatible with strict minimal RFC 9180
> implementations and requires the API of the bis document.

It is compatible. RFC 9180 talks about using both, which COSE HPKE does
not do (unless using SuppPrivInfo, which is non-interoperable anyway).
The KE stuff uses info, but that is on layer >0, so should be small.

The problem is libraries that do not implement single-shot aad at all,
which is something RFC 9180 does not talk about. However, the text
could be interpretted to encourage not supporting aad for single-shot.

Note that if library supports multi-shot, you can emulate single-shot
by creating a context and then using it once (since that is how single-
shot internally works).


> I will continue to track this with Py cryptography library authors for
> eventual compatibility with the 9180bis spec. Do you have a feeling on the
> stability of the current version of that draft?

Where the specifications overlap (and not hitting any implementation
limits), the behavior is fully compatible.

- RFC9180bis has higher minimum limits (e.g., on info size).
- RFC9180 has stuff RFC9180bis does not (e.g., auth modes).
- RFC9180bis has stuff RFC9180 does not (e.g., single-step KDFs).

I suppose one should be careful with things like single-step KDF with
auth modes (I have written HPKE library that somehow supports that).




-Ilari

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