+1 keep "none" From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of George Fletcher Sent: Monday, August 19, 2013 7:17 PM To: Justin Richer Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; jose issue tracker; [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: [jose] #36: Algorithm "none" should be removed
+1 "for being able to send unsigned content with JOSE objects" using a structure that is parallel to signed content I find symmetric models much less complex than asymmetric ones (maybe I'm missing the symmetry of the other model). In practice, most systems are only going to support a subset of the alg: values anyway and so will have to check the value on every object to ensure it's one of the ones supported for that library, or message, etc. Filtering out 'none' is not difficult. Thanks, George On 8/19/13 12:30 PM, Justin Richer wrote: I don't normally jump into the discussion on this list, but I've been using the output of JOSE for quite some time now and am a committer on the NimbusDS JOSE JWT library. However, with tonight's call coming up (which I won't be able to make) I wanted to jump in and say that from my perspective, alg:none makes a lot of sense. There's a need for being able to send unsigned content with JOSE objects, and that's been pretty well established by others on the list here. As an implementor, though, I think it makes the most sense to have the unsigned content be parallel in structure to the signed content. When reading a string and constructing objects, our library parses the header and dispatches the parser based on the "alg" parameter. And as Mike points out, alg:none has been in the spec as required to implement for ages now, and it hasn't caused the horrible security holes that people are predicting. -- Justin On 08/01/2013 07:23 AM, jose issue tracker wrote: #36: Algorithm "none" should be removed Comment (by [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>): And sure enough, working groups across the IETF are having to explicitly forbid the use of null ciphersuites. They provide empirical evidence that this design pattern is a bad idea. As I've pointed out before, you can add that verification algorithm, but you will not have a good time writing security considerations around it. Checking that you support "none" is not enough -- you have to check that *nothing* *else* in the header could possibly indicate that a different signature algorithm should be used. So we have something that (1) causes a lot of spec work, (2) causes security vulnerabilities under likely implementaiton designs, and (3) has no use case, and (4) will haunt us for years to come (how many times do you want to write 'MUST NOT use "alg":"none"'?). Sounds like a recipe for success! _______________________________________________ jose mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jose --
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