Hi James,

The text was duplicated so that there would be a complete description of the 
new algorithms, including test cases for implementers, in time for the interim 
JOSE working group meeting held the last two days.

Once the McGrew draft has been refactored to separate the description of the 
calculation steps (which JOSE is using) from the AEAD representation steps 
(which JOSE is not using), and to include test vector values that show results 
without performing the AEAD representation concatenations, I agree that we'll 
be able to just reference it, rather than duplicating it.

(I have no objection to the McGrew draft also describing the additional AEAD 
representation steps and including additional test result values that combine 
the outputs in the AEAD manner for implementations that choose to use that 
encoding - indeed, I agree that there's value in doing so for some use cases - 
they just need to be factored out, because they're separable from the 
cryptographic algorithm itself.)

                                Cheers,
                                -- Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Manger, 
James H
Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2013 8:03 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [jose] JWA replicating mcgrew-aead-aes-cbc-hmac-sha2

JOSE is at last using draft-mcgrew-aead-aes-cbc-hmac-sha2, but why is so much 
duplicated in JWA instead of referenced? JOSE should have 1 sentence saying:

  The JOSE "alg" strings "A128CBC-HS256" and "A256CBC-HS512" correspond to the 
AEAD_AES_128_CBC_HMAC_SHA_256 and AEAD_AES_256_CBC_HMAC_SHA_512 algorithms 
defined in [I-D.mcgrew-aead-aes-cbc-hmac-sha2].

That should be enough. Drop the other 4 pages of JWA on this.

If we really insist on breaking the RFC 5116 AEAD model, add 1 more paragraph.

  In [I-D.mcgrew-aead-aes-cbc-hmac-sha2] the ciphertext includes the CBC 
initialization vector as a prefix and the truncated HMAC as a suffix. In a JOSE 
these two fields are separated from the ciphertext and treated as the JWE Nonce 
and JWE Authentication Tag respectively. The JWE Ciphertext is the remaining 
ciphertext (ie minus the prefix and suffix).


Why does JWA duplicate test cases for AES_CBC_HMAC_SHA2 (Appendix C) that will 
be in draft-mcgrew-aead-aes-cbc-hmac-sha2? The test cases are not even JOSE 
messages. I hope this is a temporary addition pending the publication of 
draft-mcgrew-aead-aes-cbc-hmac-sha2-02 (with the test cases).

--
James Manger
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