Re: [jose] canonical JSON

[Tim Bray <[e-mail]>]

My instinct, as the author of a reasonably popular library that generates
canonical XML, is that JSON ought to be quite a bit easier.  But that’s
only interesting if Mike is wrong and there aren’t better alternatives. -T


On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Mike Jones <[e-mail]>wrote:

> [Repeating this on the correct thread...]
>
> I'm strongly against canonicalization.  The XML canonicalization
> experience was horrible and resulted in more interop bugs than any other
> aspect of XML DSIG, XML ENC, etc.  Let's not repeat the mistakes of our
> elders. ;-)
>
> I also haven't seen a clear use case that canonicalization solves that
> can't be more easily solved another way.
>
>                                 -- Mike
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
> Matt Miller (mamille2)
> Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 12:35 PM
> To: Richard Barnes
> Cc: Daniel Holth; Manger, James H; jose
> Subject: Re: [jose] canonical JSON
>
> I know I'm still reeling from canonicalization (c14n) issues in XML, but I
> can put that aside.  It would be nice to have JWK fingerprinting.
>
> I can see value in each JWK type defining what is canonical; I'm less
> thrilled limiting metadata to a specific place, but could live with that.
>  I can see where excluding metadata can get us in trouble later, but I
> think that would mean having a much more robust c14n approach.
>
> By the way, there is going to be a JSON BoF in Orlando, and c14n seems
> like a good thing to bring up there.
>
>
> - m&m
>
> Matt Miller < [e-mail] >
> Cisco Systems, Inc.
>
> PS: 42 vs 4.2e0 vs 4.2e1
>
> On Feb 19, 2013, at 7:59 AM, Richard Barnes <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > So your fingerprint algorithm would be something like the following?
> >
> > INPUT: JWK
> > 1. Remove "metadata" fields.  So, for RSA, you would be left with
> > {"kty", "n", "e"} 2. Convert stripped JWK to canonical form 3. Compute
> > digest over canonical form
> >
> > That seems generally agreeable to me.
> >
> > For (1) to be possible, you would need to define which fields are
> > covered in the fingerprint for each key type ("kty" value).  Or,
> > alternatively, you could restructure JWK so that metadata fields are
> grouped into a "meta"
> > sub-dict.  Which might be nice anyway.
> >
> > For (2), I agree that there is probably a better canonicalization than
> > CJSON.  The code I pasted earlier implements the following changes
> > from RFC
> > 4627:
> > -- Object fields must be in lexicographic order, sorted by field name
> > -- No white space allowed
> > -- Numbers: Exponent part must use 'e'
> > -- Numbers: Exponent part must not use '+'
> > -- Numbers: Fraction part must not have trailing zeros
> > -- Strings: All characters must be escaped ISTM that those changes are
> > fairly minimal, and avoid some of the CJSON problems that have been
> > discussed above. Reasonably people can disagree over the string
> > aspect; if you want less expansion, you could do things like exempt
> > printable ASCII.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 8:56 AM, Daniel Holth <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 1:57 AM, Manger, James H <
> >> [e-mail]> wrote:
> >>
> >>> A canonical form of JSON might be fairly easy, but the one you quote
> >>> (
> >>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Canonical_JSON) can't handle floating
> >>> point numbers (or very large integers), and produces invalid JSON if
> >>> a string includes a tab! Fix those (escaping control chars
> >>> [\u0000-\u001f]; use normalized scientific notation for numbers) and
> >>> it might be worth
> >>> considering.****
> >>>
> >>> ** **
> >>>
> >>> Defining JOSE calculations in terms of 1 or more byte arrays, the
> >>> first of which is a UTF-8-encoded JSON header, would be useful. It
> >>> can then be packaged as dot-separated base64url-encoded segments to
> >>> be HTTP-header-friendly, or packaged as a single JSON object to be
> >>> programmer-friendly, or packaged as raw bytes to be efficient.
> >>>
> >>
> >> I am only proposing a key fingerprinting specification that does not
> >> employ DER encoding. JWKs do not contain tabs or floating point numbers.
> >>
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