CBOR Encoded X.509 Certificates (C509 Certificates)
draft-ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert-20

Approval announcement
Draft of message to be sent after approval:

Announcement

From: The IESG <iesg-secretary@ietf.org>
To: IETF-Announce <ietf-announce@ietf.org>
Cc: The IESG <iesg@ietf.org>, cose-chairs@ietf.org, cose@ietf.org, draft-ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert@ietf.org, ivaylopetrov@google.com, rfc-editor@rfc-editor.org, stndrds-inacio@andrew.cmu.edu
Subject: Protocol Action: 'CBOR Encoded X.509 Certificates (C509 Certificates)' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert-20.txt)

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'CBOR Encoded X.509 Certificates (C509 Certificates)'
  (draft-ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert-20.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the CBOR Object Signing and Encryption
Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Christopher Inacio and Deb Cooley.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-cose-cbor-encoded-cert/

Ballot Text

Technical Summary

   This document specifies a CBOR encoding of X.509 certificates.  The
   resulting certificates are called C509 certificates.  The CBOR
   encoding supports a large subset of RFC 5280, common certificate
   profiles and is extensible.

   Two types of C509 certificates are defined.  One type is an
   invertible CBOR re-encoding of DER encoded X.509 certificates with
   the signature field copied from the DER encoding.  The other type is
   identical except that the signature is over the CBOR encoding instead
   of the DER encoding, avoiding the use of ASN.1.  Both types of
   certificates have the same semantics as X.509 and the same reduced
   size compared to X.509.

   The document also specifies CBOR encoded data structures for
   certificate (signing) requests and certificate request templates, new
   COSE headers, as well as a TLS certificate type and a file format for
   C509.  This document updates RFC 6698; the TLSA selectors registry is
   extended to include C509 certificates.

Working Group Summary

   The document reached a broad consensus, comparable to that of many other
   documents in the COSE WG. A controversy arose during IETF 122 regarding
   "natively signed" certificates and their evolution. However, the issue
   appears to have been resolved through discussion on the mailing list, as
   there was no further follow-up by the end of the WGLC.

Document Quality

  A demonstration implementation is available at
  https://github.com/cose-wg/CBOR-certificates/tree/master/c509_demo_impl, and a
  link to this repository is included in the document. However, the document does
  not explicitly mention this implementation. The authors have suggested that
  there are also implementations by Lijun Liao <lijun.liao@gmail.com> and Brian
  Sipos. Derek Atkins derek@ihtfp.com also seems to indicate that they have an
  implementation in https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cose/dF30vuqIcKFJw2HIT6Q7T7aj_sI/.

  The media type has not undergone a special review, as the registrations are
  straightforward and the working group possesses expertise in this area.

Personnel

   The Document Shepherd for this document is Ivaylo Petrov. The
   Responsible Area Director is Christopher Inacio.

RFC Editor Note