The problem with that is that we're inventing our own KDF at that point.  The 
upsides of Concat are that it is known to work, is known to be implemented, and 
is known to meet NIST and other existing security criteria.  At least as I see 
it, we shouldn't give up those advantages without a compelling reason to do so.

                                                            -- Mike

From: Jim Schaad [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, June 23, 2013 4:11 PM
To: Mike Jones; 'Russ Housley'
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [jose] Concat KDF

I have been thinking about this and I am going to make a different proposal.


The proposal is as follows:


1.       We eliminate the two partyX fields from the specification

2.      We define a new "ID" field which MUST be present for ECDH keys.

3.      We say that you take the ID field from the sender/recipient 
respectively and use them in the PartyX fields when doing the KDC.

The only down side of this, is that if one has a certificate then we should use 
the DER encoded subject name of the certificate but I am not sure how this 
would be encoded in the case you have a JWK which contains an x5c member.  It 
might be that we will need to defined an ID and an IDb64 field to allow for a 
binary ID to be used.

There would still need to be a requirement that the ID field be length prefixed 
in the discussion.

Jim


From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Jones
Sent: Sunday, June 23, 2013 2:57 PM
To: Russ Housley
Cc: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [jose] Concat KDF

Good idea, Russ.  How about this?

"In the general case, the specific identifiers used to tie the key derivation 
to the sender (Party U) and the receiver (Party V) are application specific and 
beyond the scope of this specification.  As an illustration of one possible 
usage, when the JWE is a JSON Web Token (JWT) [JWT], applications might specify 
that the "iss" (issuer) value be used as the "apu" value and the primary "aud" 
(audience) value be used as the "apv' value."

                                                            -- Mike

From: Russ Housley [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, June 23, 2013 7:43 AM
To: Mike Jones
Cc: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [jose] Concat KDF

Mike:

I can add a sentence along the lines of the following to make Jim's points 
below clearer to non-expert readers:

"The specific identifiers used to tie the key derivation to the sender (Party 
U) and the receiver (Party V) are application specific and beyond the scope of 
this specification."

I see the attraction of this approach, but I wonder if it would be possible to 
also include some advice to applications that make use of JOSE.

If the parties that are trying to form a pairwise key make different 
assumptions, then we do not get interoperability.  I am just trying to improve 
the likelihood of interoperability.

Russ

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