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Security COSE Working Group The CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE) specification defines cryptographic message encodings using Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR). This specification defines algorithm encodings and representations enabling RSA algorithms to be used for COSE messages.

The CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE) specification defines cryptographic message encodings using Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) . This specification defines algorithm encodings and representations enabling RSA algorithms to be used for COSE messages.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 .

The RSASSA-PSS signature algorithm is defined in . The RSASSA-PSS signature algorithm is parameterized with a hash function (h), a mask generation function (mgf) and a salt length (sLen). For this specification, the mask generation function is fixed to be MGF1 as defined in . It has been recommended that the same hash function be used for hashing the data as well as in the mask generation function, for this specification we following this recommendation. The salt length is the same length as the hash function output. Implementations need to check that the key type is 'RSA' when creating or verifying a signature. The algorithms defined in this document can be found in . name value hash salt length description PS256 -26 SHA-256 32 RSASSA-PSS w/ SHA-256 PS384 -27 SHA-384 48 RSASSA-PSS w/ SHA-384 PS512 -28 SHA-512 64 RSASSA-PSS w/ SHA-512

In addition to needing to worry about keys that are too small to provide the required security, there are issues with keys that are too large. Denial of service attacks have been mounted with overly large keys. This has the potential to consume resources with potentially bad keys. There are two reasonable ways to address this attack. First, a key should not be used for a cryptographic operation until it has been matched back to an authorized user. This approach means that no cryptography would be done except for authorized users. Second, applications can impose maximum as well as minimum length requirements on keys. This limits the resources consumed even if the matching is not performed until the cryptography has been done. There is a theoretical hash substitution attack that can be mounted against RSASSA-PSS. However, the requirement that the same hash function be used consistently for all operations is an effective mitigation against it. Unlike ECDSA, hash functions are not truncated so that the full hash value is always signed. The internal padding structure of RSASSA-PSS means that one needs to have multiple collisions between the two hash functions in order to be successful in producing a forgery based on changing the hash function. This is highly unlikely.

Key Encryption mode is also called key transport mode in some standards. Key Encryption mode differs from Key Wrap mode in that it uses an asymmetric encryption algorithm rather than a symmetric encryption algorithm to protect the key. This document defines one Key Encryption mode algorithm. When using a key encryption algorithm, the COSE_encrypt structure for the recipient is organized as follows: The 'protected' field MUST be absent. The plain text to be encrypted is the key from next layer down (usually the content layer). At a minimum, the 'unprotected' field MUST contain the 'alg' parameter and SHOULD contain a parameter identifying the asymmetric key.

RSAES-OAEP is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm. The definition of RSAEA-OAEP can be find in Section 7.1 of . The algorithm is parameterized using a masking generation function (mgf), a hash function (h) and encoding parameters (P). For the algorithm identifiers defined in this section: mgf is always set to MFG1 from and uses the same hash function as h.P is always set to the empty octet string. summarizes the rest of the values. name value hash description RSAES-OAEP w/SHA-256 -25 SHA-256 RSAES OAEP w/ SHA-256 RSAES-OAEP w/SHA-512 -26 SHA-512 RSAES OAEP w/ SHA-512 The key type MUST be 'RSA'.

A key size of 2048 bits or larger MUST be used with these algorithms. This key size corresponds roughly to the same strength as provided by a 128-bit symmetric encryption algorithm. It is highly recommended that checks on the key length be done before starting a decryption operation. One potential denial of service operation is to provide encrypted objects using either abnormally long or oddly sized RSA modulus values. Implementations SHOULD be able to encrypt and decrypt with modulus between 2048 and 16K bits in length. Applications can impose additional restrictions on the length of the modulus.

Key types are identified by the 'kty' member of the COSE_Key object. In this document we define one value for the member. name value description RSA 3 RSA Keys

This document defines a key structure for both the public and private halves of RSA keys. Together, an RSA public key and an RSA private key form an RSA key pair. Looking at the CBOR specification, the bstr that we are looking in our table below should most likely be specified as big numbers rather than as binary strings. This means that we would use the tag 6.2 instead. From my reading of the specification, there is no difference in the encoded size of the resulting output. The specification of bignum does explicitly allow for integers encoded with leading zeros. The document also provides support for the so-called "multi-prime" RSA where the modulus may have more than two prime factors. The benefit of multi-prime RSA is lower computational cost for the decryption and signature primitives. For a discussion on how multi-prime affects the security of RSA crypto-systems, the reader is referred to . This document follows the naming convention of for the naming of the fields of an RSA public or private key. The table provides a summary of the label values and the types associated with each of those labels. The requirements for fields for RSA keys are as follows: For all keys, 'kty' MUST be present and MUST have a value of 3. For public keys, the fields 'n' and 'e' MUST be present. All other fields defined in MUST be absent. For private keys with two primes, the fields 'other', 'r_i', 'd_i' and 't_i' MUST be absent, all other fields MUST be present. For private keys with more than two primes, all fields MUST be present. For the third to nth primes, each of the primes is represented as a map containing the fields 'r_i', 'd_i' and 't_i'. The field 'other' is an array of those maps. name key type value type description n 3 -1 bstr Modulus Parameter e 3 -2 int Exponent Parameter d 3 -3 bstr Private Exponent Parameter p 3 -4 bstr First Prime Factor q 3 -5 bstr Second Prime Factor dP 3 -6 bstr First Factor CRT Exponent dQ 3 -7 bstr Second Factor CRT Exponent qInv 3 -8 bstr First CRT Coefficient other 3 -9 array Other Primes Info r_i 3 -10 bstr i-th factor, Prime Factor d_i 3 -11 bstr i-th factor, Factor CRT Exponent t_i 3 -12 bstr i-th factor, Factor CRT Coefficient

This section registers values in the IANA "COSE Algorithm Registry" registry. The values in are to be added to the registry.

This section registers values in the IANA "COSE Key Type Parameters" registry. The values in are to be added to the registry.

See the per-algorithm security considerations described in and .

University of WaterlooUniversity of Waterloo

The initial version of this specification incorporates text from draft-ietf-cose-msg-05 by Jim Schaad.

[[ to be removed by the RFC Editor before publication as an RFC ]] -00 This specification addresses COSE issue #21: Restore RSA-PSS and the "RSA" key type. The initial version of this specification incorporates text from draft-ietf-cose-msg-05 -- the last COSE message specification version before the RSA algorithms were removed.