Code change:
(Last two commits on wrong branch.)
The prototype of EDHOC-Exporter() has remained EDHOC-Exporter(label, length), while it should be EDHOC-Exporter(label, context, length) as per Alternative 3 discussed in issue URL Correct?
Thanks NAME your comment is addressed in the latest commit. I merge this now.
The text use both the terms "session" and "protocol instance", would be good to settle for one term.
Just chose one, I don't think this needs an issue
In the security considerations "session" makes most sense to me. There is also the term "connection". I will make a proposal.
The spec should likely forbid multiple calls to the EDHOC-Exporter interface with the same label, in order to prevent the same key being reused. Discussed with NAME and NAME
Good catch. Yes, we should have some text about that, but it should probably more be a requirement on the application using EDHOC that on EDHOC itself. Two different application should defintly not use the same label. The same application might rederive the same key several times as long as it keep track of its AEAD nonces and replay window. I thought that we had already IANA registry proposed for this, but that is not the case. We should probably have one. If we have a IANA registry the labels get more fixed and it might be that we need a context input parameter as well.
If we make a IANA registrer for labels, I think we need to let the application add additional information in some way. Two alternatives: We make an IANA register for label prefixes, and let the application append information to the label prefix. This was recently planned for EAP-TLS (and methods built on EAP-TLS) but was changes because the TLS export labels are not really ment to be labels. This would not change the current exporter interface. We expand the interface with a context parameter. This is similar to the TLS exporter. A problem with the TLS exporter is that some implementations decided to not even support context.
NAME how is the context parameter intended to be used? Could you give an example? Would this be some sort of "salt" when deriving the key?
Don't register labels, register label prefixes.
The motivation for "context" or "label postfixes" is to increase the flexibility for the application. Restricting the application to IANA registered labels is very limiting. An application might want to use the EDHOC exporter to derive a number of keys and we should encourage that. The alternative is that the application needs to implement its own key derivation, which might be less secure and might be outside of the TEE. I called it "context" just because TLS calls the paramater in its exporter context.
"Be like TLS" is of course a good motivation. Technically, a label prefix is not different from a context, it just saves the need to separate prefix and suffix.
(And of course there is nothing wrong with multiple calls with the same label; the application has a "right to forget" :-)
The solutions should be equal when it comes to security. The choice should be made based on what is easiest for implementators and apllications using EDHOC. Alt 1. We make an IANA register for label prefixes: "OSCORE Master Secret" "OSCORE Master Salt" The Export function stays the same: EDHOC-Exporter(label, length) = EDHOC-KDF(PRK4x3m, TH4, label, length) An application is allowed to append things to the label prefix: "OSCORE Master Secret" "OSCORE Master Secret PickleRick" Alt 2. We make an IANA register for labels: label = "OSCORE Master Secret" label = "OSCORE Master Salt" The Export function needs to change: EDHOC-Exporter(label, ctx, length) = EDHOC-KDF(PRK4x3m, TH4, [label, ctx] , length) An application is not allowed to append things to the label and uses the ctx instead: label = "OSCORE Master Secret" ctx = "" label = "OSCORE Master Secret" ctx = "PickleRick"
No major opinion. Alt 2 breaks the test vector for the OSCORE security context. It would be good to get more input.
Any preference NAME NAME NAME ?
If desired the CTX is more convenient it can always be added in a wrapper on top of EDHOC-Exporter(). (I assume re-use of label+ctx in Alt 2 is equivalent to re-use of label in Alt 1?)
I prefer to have explicitly specified. We can pass to the concatenation of and . When is undefined/empty, test vectors are not affected. I guess this is what NAME is referring to?
label is a CBOR byte string. While alt 2 use an CBOR array. Definging alt2 as a wrapper seems more complication in my view.
Would be good if people stated alt 1. or alt 2. or made a concrete suggestion for alt 3.
Alt 3 (CBOR sequence) We make an IANA register for labels: label = "OSCORE Master Secret" label = "OSCORE Master Salt" The Export function needs to change: EDHOC-Exporter(label, ctx, length) = EDHOC-KDF(PRK4x3m, TH4, labelcontext, length) where is a CBOR sequence: If you want to keep the test vectors intact, then you could make optional in the CDDL, but not sure how to specify an optional parameter in the interface definition.
Thanks. That is a valid alt 3. but ctx should probably be a bstr
I don't think keeping the test vectors intact is an important goal at all. Let's decide on what is simplest for a user of the exporter interface.
Something like that, yes. Later post do differentiate the type of "label" and "ctx" and in light of that and changing test vectors Alt3 seems clean.
I am fine with alt 3. I can start making PR for that unless somebody has different ideas. I don't alt 1 is a good alternative anymore as is restricts context to being a unicode string. Which would require some base64 encoding or similar for a general context.
Please review alt. 3 as specified in . Unless there are any comments we would like to merge this.
This is included in -07 so I close the issue.
Comment by Martin Disch in URL "The draft does a good job of pointing to the right places in RFC 8152, but I still ended up trying to understand another ~100 page document just to implement the few constructs I actually needed." Should we provide more details about COSE constructs, e.g. in appendix A.2?
(pasting my response from the mailing list here for completeness) Thanks for following up on this. Yes, in my opinion expanding on the COSE constructs would be helpful. But I also sympathize with not wanting to duplicate what is already defined in another RFC (and possibly getting it wrong, as Carsten points out). Considering that there are quite a few implementers already and besides mine you have only received one other similar comment, maybe this isn't an issue for a meaningful majority. In any case, the draft has made great strides already in terms of accessibility and is in a good state now, so I don't see improvements in this area as an absolute necessity.
The two COSE constructs that are used in EHDOC, and are fairly simple. They don't use the recursive structure or embed . I think it is possible to add some additional clarifications on the structure of the COSE messages in the EHDOC draft without having to copy too much text from RFC 8152. As part of a thesis I built a proof-of-concept implementation of EDHOC in the Rust programming language available at URL The naming of the repository is due to the subject being both EDHOC and OSCORE on embedded devices, but the following refers only to the EDHOC implementation. It's based on draft-selander-ace-cose-ecdhe-14 and as such, sadly, outdated. Since it was just one part of the overall work, I only managed to implement the subset I needed, which is RPK and the signature-signature based scheme (corresponding to what draft-selander-lake-edhoc calls method 0). I also took some other shortcuts, such as not supporting auxiliary data. Fortunately, test vectors were about to be introduced just around the time I was working on it, so I've been able to successfully verify my implementation against them when John shared them with me for some preliminary testing. Since I didn't have any prior experience implementing this kind of software, I would definitely consider it more of an experiment, but it's out there and it works, in case it can be useful to anybody. I'm convinced that EDHOC will be valuable particularly in the context of OSCORE, possibly even beyond that. As for the draft itself, I would like to mention one aspect that I think could be improved from the perspective of an implementer. Part of the promise of EDHOC is that it's simple and lightweight due to reusing COSE. That is certainly the case, but breaks down somewhat when working on a system where no fully featured library for it is available. This was the case for me and I personally found it difficult to quickly figure out which aspects of COSE I needed to implement. The draft does a good job of pointing to the right places in RFC 8152, but I still ended up trying to understand another ~100 page document just to implement the few constructs I actually needed. I know the authors are aware of this and there has been some effort to inline more information directly in the specification, which I greatly appreciate. It would be very nice to have an entirely self-contained document to work with. But I have to again point out my lack of experience in that area, it's entirely possible that this draft is in fact much better than others in this regard and I just don't know it yet. With that I would like to support the adoption and am looking forward to seeing how it develops. Kind regards, Martin

Related discussion:
text: is a CDDL defined type, and Description is a text string.  The initial contents of the registry is shown in fig-error-codes. <del> 9.4. </del> <ins> 9.5. </ins> IANA has added the well-known URI 'edhoc' to the Well-Known URIs registry.