Re: [jose] Should we keep or remove the JOSE JWS and JWE MIME types?

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

Multiplexing JWE and JWS under a single JOSE media type only makes sense if
there's a defined algorithm to demux them.  So if you want to do this, you
would need to write down the algorithm.

Personally, it seems simpler and clearer to me to just have the four
current types, so that you know which type of object you're dealing with,
and in what serialization, without having to do content sniffing.


On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 9:26 PM, Mike Jones <[e-mail]>wrote:

>  The JWS and JWE documents currently define these MIME types for the
> convenience of applications that may want to use them:****
>
>                 application/jws****
>
>                 application/jws+json****
>
>                 application/jwe****
>
>                 application/jwe+json****
>
> ** **
>
> That being said, I’m not aware of any uses of these by applications at
> present.  Thus, I think that makes it fair game to ask whether we want to
> keep them or remove them – in which case, if applications ever needed them,
> they could define them later.****
>
> ** **
>
> Another dimension of this question for JWS and JWE is that it’s not clear
> that the four types application/jws, application/jws+json, application/jwe,
> and application/jwe+json are even the right ones.  It might be more useful
> to have generic application/jose and application/jose+json types, which
> could hold either JWS or JWE objects respectively using the compact or JSON
> serializations (although I’m not advocating adding them at this time).****
>
> ** **
>
> Having different JWS versus JWE MIME types apparently did contribute to at
> least Dick’s confusion about the purpose of the “typ” field, so deleting
> them could help eliminate this possibility of confusion in the future.
> Thus, I’m increasingly convinced we should get rid of the JWS and JWE types
> and leave it up to applications to define the types they need, when they
> need them.****
>
> ** **
>
> Do people have use cases for these four MIME types now or should we leave
> them to future specs to define, if needed?****
>
> ** **
>
>                                                                 -- Mike***
> *
>
> ** **
>
> P.S.  For completeness, I’ll add that the JWK document also defines these
> MIME types:****
>
>                 application/jwk+json****
>
>                 application/jwk-set+json****
>
> ** **
>
> There are already clear use cases for these types, so I’m not advocating
> deleting them, but wanted to call that out explicitly.  For instance, when
> retrieving a JWK Set document referenced by a “jku” header parameter, I
> believe that the result should use the application/jwk-set+json type.  (In
> fact, I’ll add this to the specs, unless there are any objections.)
> Likewise, draft-miller-jose-jwe-protected-jwk-02 already uses
> application/jwk+json.  Both could also be as “cty” values when encrypting
> JWKs and JWK Sets, in contexts where that that would be useful.****
>
> ** **
>
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