Subject: [COSE] Proposed charter update

From: Göran Selander <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 11:15:15 +0000

Hi COSE,

John and I looked at the charter text in the Github, the text on CBOR certificates is not accurately reflecting the new direction that was discussed and seemed to be agreed upon at IETF 109. Here is a proposal to change that:

OLD
A CBOR encoding of the compressed certificate profile defined in RFC 7925. It is expected that the compression works with a large subset of RFC 7925 and takes into consideration any updates in draft-ietf-uta-tls13-iot-profile-00. The compression may also include other important IoT certificate profiles like IEEE 802.1AR. The main objective is to define a method of compressing current X.509 certificates that meet a specific profile into a smaller format. This compression algorithm is loss-less so they can be expanded and normal X.509 certificate processing used. The data structures used to encode such compressed X.509 certificates are expected to produce a compact encoding for certificate information, and are not necessarily tied specifically to X.509 certificates. Accordingly, a secondary objective is to reuse these data structures to produce a native COSE certificate encoding; such a structure is relevant in situations where DER parsing and the compression/decompression machinery to convert between CBOR and DER encodings are unnecessary overhead, such as embedded implementations. The possibility of a joint certificate artifact, conveyed in CBOR encoding but including signatures over both the CBOR and DER encodings, may be explored. This work will be based on draft-mattsson-cose-cbor-cert-compress. The working group will collaborate and coordinate with other IETF WGs such as TLS, UTA, LAKE to understand and validate the requirements and solution.

NEW
A CBOR encoding of the certificate profile defined in RFC 5280. It is expected that the compression works with RFC 7925 and takes into consideration any updates in draft-ietf-uta-tls13-iot-profile-00. The compression may also include other important IoT certificate profiles like IEEE 802.1AR. The main objective is to define a method of compressing current X.509 certificates that meet a specific profile into a smaller format. This compression algorithm is loss-less so they can be expanded and normal X.509 certificate processing used. The data structures used to encode such compressed X.509 certificates are expected to produce a compact encoding for certificate information, and are not necessarily tied specifically to X.509 certificates. Accordingly, a secondary objective is to reuse these data structures to produce a natively signed COSE certificate encoding; such a structure is relevant in situations where DER parsing and the compression/decompression machinery to convert between CBOR and DER encodings are unnecessary overhead, such as embedded implementations. The possibility of a joint certificate artifact, conveyed in CBOR encoding but including signatures over both the CBOR and DER encodings, may be explored. This work will be based on draft-mattsson-cose-cbor-cert-compress. The working group will collaborate and coordinate with other IETF WGs such as TLS, UTA, LAKE to understand and validate the requirements and solution.

The changes are only in the two first sentences, and “native” is changed to “natively signed”

Göran and John