Re: [jose] RFC 8037 "alg" quirkiness

Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@mit.edu> Sat, 19 September 2020 04:01 UTC

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Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2020 21:01:27 -0700
From: Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@mit.edu>
To: Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com>
Cc: Ilari Liusvaara <ilariliusvaara@welho.com>, "jose@ietf.org" <jose@ietf.org>
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Subject: Re: [jose] RFC 8037 "alg" quirkiness
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Hi Anders,

[The quoting seems to have gotten messed up; IIUC the context was the
following]

> >> - In general, using the same key with multiple algorithms is not
> >>     cryptographically safe. There can be algorithm pairs which interact
> >>     badly (for instance, Ed25519 and the original Ed25519ph).

On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 07:02:09AM +0200, Anders Rundgren wrote:
> Apparently the PKIX folks came to a different conclusion:
> 
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8410#section-3
> 
> "The same algorithm identifiers are used for identifying a public key,
>   a private key, and a signature (for the two EdDSA related OIDs)."

I'm not seeing how that's inconsistent with one-algorithm-per-key -- you
know from the context in which the OID appears whether you have a
signature, public, or private key, and that context is used to namespace
the following algorithm lookup.  Accordingly, there is no ambiguity as to
what the OID means, in that context.

-Ben