Re: [MLS] Improving client authentication

[Benjamin Beurdouche <[e-mail]>]

Good to know. I’ll have a look :)
Thanks for the info Ben !
B.

> On Dec 14, 2020, at 5:21 AM, Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Ben,
> 
> Taking a bit of a tangent...
> 
>> On Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 10:23:59AM +0100, Benjamin Beurdouche wrote:
>> 
>>> On 29 Nov 2020, at 18:13, Raphael Robert <raphael=[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Something less relevant to this discussion but I want to mention it
>> here...  This raises an issue that I have seen a lot over the last few
>> years: we need something which performs a similar role to the WebPKI but
>> doesn’t have the complexity of X.509.  Note that half of the attacks
>> against TLS implementations are actually attacks against ASN1/X.509
>> parsers, and we don’t really need this complexity for MLS.
>> 
>> We should probably use X.509 in many cases because it is well supported
>> by HSMs but in the long run, I think we should create WG and start
>> thinking of a replacement to X.509 for places (not the Web) that don’t
>> need the complexity.
> 
> This isn't quite what you're hoping for, but there's some work in the COSE
> WG to subset X.509 certificates and produce a more compact encoding for
> them; the same machinery will be naturally usable for making "CBOR native"
> certificates (that use COSE for the signatures instead of operating on the
> ASN.1 DER) that don't allow the full complexity of X.509.  The doc is
> draft-mattsson-cose-cbor-cert-compress (we'll be rechartering in order to
> pick it up as a WG item).
> 
> -Ben