Subject: Protocol Action: 'Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)' to Internet Standard (draft-ietf-cbor-7049bis-16.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2020 10:05:29 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)'
  (draft-ietf-cbor-7049bis-16.txt) as Internet Standard

This document is the product of the Concise Binary Object Representation
Maintenance and Extensions Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Murray Kucherawy and Barry Leiba.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-cbor-7049bis/

Technical Summary:

The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a data format whose
design goals include the possibility of extremely small code size, fairly small
message size, and extensibility without the need for version negotiation. These
design goals make it different from earlier binary serializations such as ASN.1
and MessagePack.

Working Group Summary:

It is worth noting the controversy about the text on how generic decoders
handle duplicate map keys. While RFC7049 stated that decoders cannot
prescribe a specific handling of duplicated map keys, except it might consider
the map malformed, part of the working group wanted the document to state
more precisely what the decoder should do, and possibly what the protocol
using CBOR should do (e.g. use first entry). This was considered, but would
have made existing implementation non-compliant with this specification.
Consensus was difficult to call, but in the end some text was added to explain
the different options (reject the map, accept the map including the duplicates,
lose some entries) and give guidance to implementations on what is expected of
the application in every one of these cases. (See section 5.6)

Document Quality:

There exist a significant number of implementations of this specification, see
https://cbor.io/impls.html for a non-exhaustive list.
Several of the working group participants have provided continuous reviews to
the document, and have agreed that the document is ready for publication.

Personnel:

Francesca Palombini is the Document Shepherd.
Barry Leiba is the Responsible Area Director.