Musings on Digital Identity

Month: March 2022

Two new COSE- and JOSE-related Internet Drafts with Tobias Looker

IETF logoThis week, Tobias Looker and I submitted two individual Internet Drafts for consideration by the COSE working group.

The first is “Barreto-Lynn-Scott Elliptic Curve Key Representations for JOSE and COSE“, the abstract of which is:


This specification defines how to represent cryptographic keys for the pairing-friendly elliptic curves known as Barreto-Lynn-Scott (BLS), for use with the key representation formats of JSON Web Key (JWK) and COSE (COSE_Key).

These curves are used in Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) representations for JOSE and COSE, where the ZKPs use the CFRG drafts “Pairing-Friendly Curves” and “BLS Signatures“.

The second is “CBOR Web Token (CWT) Claims in COSE Headers“, the abstract of which is:


This document describes how to include CBOR Web Token (CWT) claims in the header parameters of any COSE structure. This functionality helps to facilitate applications that wish to make use of CBOR Web Token (CWT) claims in encrypted COSE structures and/or COSE structures featuring detached signatures, while having some of those claims be available before decryption and/or without inspecting the detached payload.

JWTs define a mechanism for replicating claims as header parameter values, but CWTs have been missing the equivalent capability to date. The use case is the same as that which motivated Section 5.3 of JWT “Replicating Claims as Header Parameters” – encrypted CWTs for which you’d like to have unencrypted instances of particular claims to determine how to process the CWT prior to decrypting it.

We plan to discuss both with the COSE working group at IETF 113 in Vienna.

Minor Updates to OAuth DPoP Prior to IETF 113 in Vienna

OAuth logoThe editors have applied some minor updates to the OAuth DPoP specification in preparation for discussion at IETF 113 in Vienna. Updates made were:

  • Renamed the always_uses_dpop client registration metadata parameter to dpop_bound_access_tokens.
  • Clarified the relationships between server-provided nonce values, authorization servers, resource servers, and clients.
  • Improved other descriptive wording.

The specification is available at:

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén