Month: November 2025

Design Team Decisions Applied to JOSE HPKE Specification

On November 30, 2025

In Cryptography, IETF, JSON, Specifications

A design team formed and met after the JOSE working group meeting at IETF 124 in Montreal to discuss possible next steps for the JOSE HPKE specification. As recorded in the PR applying the decisions made, the design team produced these recommendations:

Not use "enc" when performing Integrated Encryption.
Define one new Key Management Mode for Integrated Encryption.
Integrate the new mode into the Message Encryption and Message Decryption instructions from RFC 7516 and replace them.
Utilize distinct algorithm identifiers for the use of HPKE for Integrated Encryption and HPKE for Key Encryption.
Only use the Recipient_structure when doing Key Encryption and not when doing Integrated Encryption.

Draft 15 has now been published, which incorporates these decisions. Note that the title of the specification has been changed to “Use of Hybrid Public Key Encryption (HPKE) with JSON Web Encryption (JWE)” to more precisely describe what it does.

Those attending the design team were Karen O’Donoghue, John Bradley, Hannes Tschofenig, Filip Skokan, Brian Campbell, Leif Johansson, Paul Bastian, and myself – with it all being kicked off by Deb Cooley.

Special thanks to Filip Skokan for creating the examples used in the specification.

Brian and I celebrated our deliberations together with a mostly failed attempt at ping pong, the design team meeting having been held in the Ping Pong room.

Ping Pong between Brian Campbell and Mike Jones

I believe the next steps are to apply the same decisions to the COSE HPKE specification and then hold another set of concurrent working group last calls (WGLCs) for both specifications.

Working Group Last Call for OpenID Federation

By Mike Jones

On November 20, 2025

In Federation, OpenID, Specifications

Today the OpenID Connect Working Group started a two-week Working Group Last Call (WGLC) for the OpenID Federation 1.0 specification. During the two weeks ending on December 4, 2025, working group members will identify any issues that they believe should be addressed before it becomes final. Of course, responses of the form “It’s ready to go as it is” are welcome too!

Draft 45 of the OpenID Federation specification, which was published today, is the target of the WGLC review. It adds two features motivated by the security analysis of the last Implementer’s Draft. They are:

peer_trust_chain header parameter: This enables an RP to provide a Trust Chain from the OP it is establishing trust with to the Trust Anchor that it selected at registration time. This works with both Automatic Registration and Explicit Registration and can be used in other trust establishment regimes. When a Trust Chain is also provided from the RP to the same Trust Anchor, together these enable a property called Federation Integrity, which is described in How to link an application protocol to an OpenID Federation 1.0 trust layer.
trust_anchor_hints claim: This enables Entities to publish the Trust Anchors that they are configured to trust. This can facilitate determining what Trust Anchors are shared between parties.

It also contains several important editorial improvements, including organizing the Entity Statement claims by where they may and may not appear. The changes made in -45 are detailed in the Document History section.

Thanks to all who helped us reach this point! Nearly done…