Hi Kathleen,

Thanks for taking the time to review the draft and write up today’s and 
yesterday’s comments.  Replies inline below…

From: jose [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kathleen Moriarty
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2015 7:47 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [jose] AD review of draft-ietf-jose-jwk-thumbprint-04

Another thing has been bugging me since reading the draft yesterday and I'm not 
sure if this was discussed in the WG or not.  There appear to be differences in 
how a JWT thumbprint is described in the draft.  I'd like to see if we can work 
this out before progress the draft into IETF last call.

The definition is not entirely clear.
Section 3 clearly states that the required members of the JWT are part of the 
thumbprint.
Section 3.2.2, although the subtitle makes the point that this is about why 
optional members are not included, the following sentence appears:

   The JWK Thumbprint value is a

   digest of the key value itself -- not of additional data that may

   also accompany the key.

3.2.2 was included in response to earlier review comments by Jim Schaad.  It’s 
there to motivate the particular choices made.  Is there some way in which you 
find 3 and 3.2.2 to be inconsistent?  3 is a positive statement about what’s 
included and the sentence in 3.2.2 that you quoted above is a negative 
statement about what’s not included, but that is consistent with the positive 
statement.  The negative statement is included to help readers understand the 
reasoning.  Is there some way in which you found it confusing or misleading?  
Is there a particular change you might suggest to alleviate your concern?

Section 3.4 - Why is this allowed?  If it's not in JWT format, it is some other 
kind of thumbprint. You are essentially creating a JWK to have the key and 
required members I am assuming, but that's not clear and this text could leave 
interoperability challenges.

3.4 points out that the draft specifies a mathematical computation over a key 
value, which can be performed on any key.  It’s stating what’s possible, more 
than what’s stating what’s allowed.  Yes, you’re right that you’d be creating a 
JWK representation of the key value to create the thumbprint.  If a thumbprint 
of the key is needed, this may be a reasonable choice in some application 
contexts.

Thanks,
Kathleen

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Kathleen Moriarty 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 
wrote:
Hi,

Thanks for your work on draft-ietf-jose-jwk-thumbprint-04.  This is the last 
one, right?  Great job getting through the JOSE work!

I read through the draft and have mostly editorial comments that I'd like to 
see if we can fix.

Section 2:
The definition needs some tweaking:

 JWK Thumbprint
      The digest value for a key that is the subject of this
      specification.

"the subject of this specification" should not part of text for a definition.  
The definition needs to clearly explain the term without having to read the 
whole specification.  Can you suggest something else?

Karen relayed text from Jim to me that I like and that will be used to improve 
the definition.  It was:

“This document defines a method for computing a hash value over a JSON Web Key 
structure.  The document describes what the subset of fields in a key to be 
used are, the method of creating a canonical form for those fields and how to 
convert the resulting UNICODE string into a byte sequence appropriate for 
hashing.”

Section 4:

Can you break this sentence into 2:
However, if new JWK members are defined that use non-ASCII member
   names, their definitions should specify the exact Unicode code point
   sequences used to represent them, particularly in cases in which
   Unicode normalization could result in the transformation of one set
   of code points into another under any circumstances.

OK

Can you get rid of the parens around the second sentence?
   Use of escaped characters in JWKs for which JWK Thumbprints will be
   computed should be avoided.  (Use of escaped characters in the hash
   input JWKs derived from these original JWKs is prohibited.)

OK

Can you reword this sentence/paragraph?  I had to read it multiple times.  
While I understand what you are saying, it could be easier to read.
   While there is a natural representation to use for numeric values
   that are integers, this specification does not attempt to define a
   standard representation for numbers that are not integers or that
   contain an exponent component.  This is not expected to be a problem
   in practice, as the required members of JWK representations are not
   expected to use numbers that are not integers.

OK

General comment, the use of long sentences and frequency of parens make the 
draft more difficult to read.

Thanks for pointing this out.  I’ll try to keep this in mind.

Thanks!

                                                            Thanks again!
                                                            -- Mike

--

Best regards,
Kathleen



--

Best regards,
Kathleen
_______________________________________________
jose mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jose

Reply via email to