Re: [woes] Naked Public Key, was: RE: Proposed charter, post-Quebec edition

"Paul C. Bryan" <paul.bryan@forgerock.com> Mon, 08 August 2011 17:09 UTC

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From: "Paul C. Bryan" <paul.bryan@forgerock.com>
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Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:09:24 -0700
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Subject: Re: [woes] Naked Public Key, was: RE: Proposed charter, post-Quebec edition
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On Mon, 2011-08-08 at 09:41 -0700, Ben Adida wrote:

> On 8/8/11 8:36 AM, Hal Lockhart wrote:
> >
> > I am with Eric here. I would like to explicitly state that I think it
> > is NOT desirable to do anything which encourages people to do new
> > implementations of crypto operations. The corollary is that the spec
> > should specify objects in formats which make them easy to be passed
> > as arguments to existing libraries, especially libraries which are
> > likely to be present in the target environment.
> 
> I think this may miss some important use cases. We're using JWT/JWS at 
> https://browserid.org, and we need to do all of the crypto in 
> JavaScript. JavaScript-based crypto, and crypto in other programming 
> languages in general, is likely to be a growing need. So, "no new 
> implementations" is unrealistic. There will be new implementations. 
> There have to be.

I think the point is that one should use existing, proven software
libraries to implement the cryptography wherever possible—JOSE should
not necessitate a novel application of cryptography to achieve the
charter objectives. If no such library exists in a particular
programming/runtime environment, then obviously one would need to be
developed. That said, I would suggest that such a new implementation
focus on implementing the cryptographic functions much the way they are
implemented in other environments, and allow JOSE implementations to
build upon that. 


> If we force these new implementations to bear the full complexity of 
> X.509, then we're introducing security risk. It would be much better if 
> we had a simpler, JSON-focused certificate format.
> 
> We don't get to choose whether there will be new implementations. We 
> only get to choose how simple those have to be.
> 
> -Ben
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