Re: [jose] encrypting AND signing a token

Not only is my original token increasing in size by 4/3, I am also adding another header, payload and signature.

One of the objectives of JWT was to enabled compact tokens. It would seem that we should be able to support both signing and encryption of the same token.

All the encryption use cases I can think of involving asymmetric keys would also require signing with the senders private key. 

My suggestion is to be explicit in what the algorithm etc. is used for:

Rather than "alg" and "enc", we have:

"algs" - algorithm for token signing
"algk" - algorithm for content management key encryption
"alge" - algorithm for payload encryption

Similiarly,

"kids" - key id for signing
"kidk" - key id for content managment key encryption

We could probably make these three or even two letter codes if you want to save a couple bytes.

-- Dick

On Nov 2, 2012, at 8:46 AM, Mike Jones <Michael.Jones@microsoft.com> wrote:

> The way you put it brings one straightforward solution to mind.  Solve 1-3 with a JWE.  Solve 4-5 by signing the JWE as a JWS payload.  Done.
> 
> I do understand that the 4/3 space blowup-of double base64url encoding the JWE motivates your earlier proposal about nested signing.  (See Dick's 10/29/12 message "[jose] signing an existing JWT".)  I also understand that if you could do integrity with the asymmetric signature then the integrity provided by the JWE itself may be redundant.  I don't have a specific proposal on how to do that.
> 
> 				-- Mike
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jose-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:jose-bounces@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Dick Hardt
> Sent: Friday, November 02, 2012 8:22 AM
> To: jose@ietf.org
> Subject: [jose] encrypting AND signing a token
> 
> I am trying to figure out how to implement JWT/JWS/JWE to solve a real world problem.
> 
> 1) Bob sends a token to Charlie via Alice. (Alice gets token from Bob and then Alice gives token to Charlie) 
> 2) Alice must be prevented from reading the token. (token needs to be encrypted)
> 3) Bob and Charlie can share a symmetric key.
> 
> I can solve this with JWE.
> 
> Now let's add another condition.
> 
> 4) Charlie wants non-repuditation that Bob created the token. 
> 5) Bob has a private key and a public key
> 
> I don't see how to do this using JWE. It seems I have to sign the same token I had previously with JWS. This seems inefficient since I should be able to replace the JWE integrity computation done with the symmetric key with the private key -- but the "alg" parameter is the same in both encrypting and signing. 
> 
> Now let's expand this to replacing the symmetric key with a public/private key pair for encryption. Bob encrypts with Charlies public key and signs with Bob's private key (we also need to make sure we are not doing naive encryption and signing here, would be a really useful to specify what needs to be done there). Now we need to have parameters for both public/private key pairs in the header.
> 
> Am I missing something here?
> 
> Seems like we can do this if we change the header parameters to specify if they ("alg", "kid", et.c) are for token signing, payload encryption or content key encryption.
> 
> -- Dick
> 
> 
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