Reviewer: Stephen Kent Review result: Ready SECDIR review of draft-ietf-cbor-sequence-01 The summary of the review is Ready, with one suggested edit. I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's ongoing effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the IESG. These comments were written with the intent of improving security requirements and considerations in IETF drafts. Comments not addressed in last call may be included in AD reviews during the IESG review. Document editors and WG chairs should treat these comments just like any other last call comments. The Abstract says that this short document describes the Concise Binary Object Representation(CBOR) Sequence format and associated media type "application/cbor seq". The document indicates that the motivation for this extension of the base CBOR specification (RFC 7049) is to specify a format for CBOR sequences, which allow incremental production and consumption of such sequences while imposing minimal demands on a CBOR parser. The Security Considerations section consists of just two, brief paragraphs. The first says that the considerations of the base CBRO specification (RFC 7049) apply, which seems reasonable. The Security Considerations section of that document is well written. It discusses several types of potential vulnerabilities associated with complex parsers, and notes that CBOR tries to reduce the range of some type of attacks by striving to reduce parser complexity. This document notes that COSE (RFC 8152) can be employed if security services, e.g., data integrity, are required. This too seems reasonable, since COSE explicitly specifies mechanisms for offering such services for CBOR-formatted data. The second paragraph of the Security Considerations section reminds the reader that decoders (parsers) ought to be designed with the understanding that inputs are untrusted – good advice. I’d be happier if the final sentence changed “must” to “MUST” to reinforce this admonition.
