[Rats] Re: I-D Action: draft-ietf-rats-ear-04.txt

[Nathanael Ritz <[e-mail]>]

Hello!

On Sat, 30 May 2026 at 13:11, Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> Thomas Fossati <[e-mail]> wrote:
> [snip]

    >> I'm not keen on PEM here... what is the PEM format for a raw public
>     >> key?
>
>     > It's SPKI; see
>     >
> https://ietf-rats-wg.github.io/draft-ietf-rats-ear/key/draft-ietf-rats-ear.html#section-3.1-2.16.1
>
> so: https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7468/#section-13
> I can live with that, so yeah.
>
>
Well, "I can live with that" isn't exactly an enthusiastic endorsement, but
I've been trying to figure out if I should have a strong intution of a
preference, myself.

How much extra burden will adding COSE_Key support create compared to the
performance gains at large scales? Is throughput performance a factor here,
or is it more about someone with COSE whatever support already at hand
feeling annoyed 5 years from now when they have to maintain tooling to
parse a legacy SPKI formatted key? I think Henk has already provided other
parallel examples of work that supports COSE_Key, but does the WG have
implementation feedback on how much they like or don't like having to
provide support?

Do we have any further data here beyond (with deep apologies)
"implementation ergonomics philosophy", for lack of a better term?

Cheers,
Nathanael