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Applications and Real-Time CBOR CBOR (STD 94, RFC 8949) defines "Deterministically Encoded CBOR" in its Section 4.2, providing some flexibility for application specific decisions. To facilitate Deterministic Encoding to be offered as a selectable feature of generic encoders, the present document defines a CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding (CDE) Profile that can be shared by a large set of applications with potentially diverging detailed requirements. This document also introduces the concept of Application Profiles, which are layered on top of the CBOR CDE Profile and can address more application specific requirements. Application Profiles are defined in separate documents. About This Document Status information for this document may be found at . Discussion of this document takes place on the Concise Binary Object Representation Maintenance and Extensions (CBOR) Working Group mailing list (), which is archived at . Subscribe at . Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at .

Introduction CBOR (STD 94, RFC 8949) defines "Deterministically Encoded CBOR" in its Section 4.2, providing some flexibility for application specific decisions. To facilitate Deterministic Encoding to be offered as a selectable feature of generic encoders, the present document defines a CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding (CDE) Profile that can be shared by a large set of applications with potentially diverging detailed requirements. This document also introduces the concept of Application Profiles, which are layered on top of the CBOR CDE Profile and can address more application specific requirements. Application Profiles are defined in separate documents. is an example for such a document.

Conventions and Definitions 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 BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding Profile (CDE) This specification defines the CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding Profile (CDE) based on the Core Deterministic Encoding Requirements defined for CBOR in Section of RFC 8949 . In many cases, CBOR provides more than one way to encode a data item, but also provides a recommendation for a Preferred Serialization. The CoRE Deterministic Encoding Requirements generally pick the preferred serializations as mandatory; they also pick additional choices such as definite-length encoding. Finally, it defines a map ordering based on lexicographic ordering of the (deterministically) encoded map keys. Note that this specific set of requirements is elective — in principle, other variants of deterministic encoding can be defined (and have been, now being phased out slowly, as detailed in Section of RFC 8949 ). In many applications of CBOR today, deterministic encoding is not used at all, as its restriction of choices can create some additional performance cost and code complexity. 's core requirements are designed to provide well-understood and easy-to-implement rules while maximizing coverage, i.e., the subset of CBOR data items that are fully specified by these rules, and also placing minimal burden on implementations. Section of RFC 8949 picks up on the interaction of extensibility (CBOR tags) and deterministic encoding. CBOR itself uses some tags to increase the range of its basic generic data types, e.g., tags 2/3 extend the range of basic major types 0/1 in a seamless way. Section of RFC 8949 recommends handling this transition the same way as with the transition between different integer representation lengths in the basic generic data model, i.e., by mandating the preferred serialization for all integers (Section of RFC 8949 ).

1. The CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding Profile (CDE) turns this recommendation into a mandate: Integers that can be represented by basic major type 0 and 1 are encoded using the deterministic encoding defined for them, and integers outside this range are encoded using the preferred serialization (Section of RFC 8949 ) of tag 2 and 3 (i.e., no leading zero bytes).

Most tags capture more specific application semantics and therefore may be harder to define a deterministic encoding for. While the deterministic encoding of their tag internals is often covered by the Core Deterministic Encoding Requirements, the mapping of diverging platform application data types on the tag contents may be hard to do in a deterministic way; see for more explanation as well as examples. As the CDE would continually need to address additional issues raised by the registration of new tags, this specification recommends that new tag registrations address deterministic encoding in the context of this Profile. A particularly difficult field to obtain deterministic encoding for is floating point numbers, partially because they themselves are often obtained from processes that are not entirely deterministic between platforms. See for more details. Section of RFC 8949 presents a number of choices, which need to be made to obtain a CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding Profile (CDE). Specifically, CDE specifies (in the order of the bullet list at the end of Section of RFC 8949 ):

1. Besides the mandated use of preferred serialization, there is no further specific action for the two different zero values, e.g., an encoder that is asked by an application to represent a negative floating point zero will generate 0xf98000.
2. There is no attempt to mix integers and floating point numbers, i.e., all floating point values are encoded as the preferred floating-point representation that accurately represents the value, independent of whether the floating point value is, mathematically, an integral value (choice 2 of the second bullet).
3. There is no special handling of NaN values, except that the preferred serialization rules also apply to NaNs with payloads, using the canonical encoding of NaNs as defined in . Specifically, this means that shorter forms of encodings for a NaN are used when that can be achieved by only removing trailing zeros in the payload. Further clarifying , the CBOR encoding uses a leading bit of 1 to encode a quiet NaN; encoding of signaling NaN is NOT RECOMMENDED but is achieved by using a leading bit of 0. Typically, most applications that employ NaNs in their storage and communication interfaces will only use the NaN with payload 0, which therefore deterministically encodes as 0xf97e00.
4. There is no special handling of subnormal values.
5. The CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding Profile does not presume equivalence of basic floating point values with floating point values using other representations (e.g., tag 4/5).

The main intent here is to preserve the basic generic data model, so applications (or Application Profiles, see ) can make their own decisions within that data model. E.g., an application (profile) can decide that it only ever allows a single NaN value that would encoded as 0xf97e00, so a CDE implementation focusing on this application (profile) would not need to provide processing for other NaN values. Basing the definition of both CDE and Application Profiles on the generic data model of CBOR also means that there is no effect on the Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL) , except where the data description documents encoding decisions for byte strings carrying embedded CBOR.

Application Profiles While the CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding Profile (CDE) provides for commonality between different applications of CBOR, it is useful to further constrain the set of data items handled in a group of applications (exclusions) and to define further mappings (reductions) that help the applications in such a group get by with the exclusions. For example, the dCBOR Application Profile specifies the use of Deterministic Encoding as defined in Section of RFC 8949 (see also for more information) together with some application-level rules. See for a definition of the dCBOR Application Profile that makes use of CDE. In general, the application-level rules specified by an Application Profile are based on the shared CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding Profile; they do not "fork" CBOR in the sense of requiring distinct generic encoder/decoder implementations. An Application Profile implementation produces well-formed, deterministically encoded CBOR according to , and existing generic CBOR decoders will therefore be able to decode it, including those that check for Deterministic Encoding ("CDE decoders", see also ). Similarly, generic CBOR encoders will be able to produce valid CBOR that can be processed by Application Profile implementations, if handed Application Profile conforming data model level information from an application. Please note that the separation between standard CBOR processing and the processing required by the Application Profile is a conceptual one: Instead of employing generic encoders/decoders, both Application Profile processing and standard CBOR processing can be combined into a encoder/decoder specifically designed for the Application Profile. An Application Profile is intended to be used in conjunction with an application, which typically will use a subset of the CBOR generic data model, which in turn influences which subset of the application profile is used. As a result, an Application Profile itself places no direct requirement on what minimum subset of CBOR is implemented. For instance, an application profile might define rules for the processing of floating point values, but there is no requirement that implementations of that Application Profile support floating point numbers (or any other kind of number, such as arbitrary precision integers or 64-bit negative integers) when they are used with applications that do not use them.

CDDL support defines control operators to indicate that the contents of a byte string carries a CBOR-encoded data item (.cbor) or a sequence of CBOR-encoded data items (.cborseq). CDDL specifications may want to specify that the data items should be encoded in Common CBOR Deterministic Encoding. This specification adds two CDDL control operators that can be used for this. The control operators .cde and .cdeseq are exactly like .cbor and .cborseq except that they also require the encoded data item(s) to be in Common CBOR Deterministic Encoding. For example, a byte string of embedded CBOR that is to be encoded according to CDE can be formalized as: More importantly, if the encoded data item also needs to have a specific structure, this can be expressed by the right hand side (instead of using the most general CDDL type any here). (Note that the .cborseq control operator does not enable specifying different deterministic encoding requirements for the elements of the sequence. If a use case for such a feature becomes known, it could be added.) Obviously, Application Profiles can define similar control operators that also embody the processing required by the Application Profile, and are encouraged to do so.

Security Considerations The security considerations in Section of RFC 8949 apply. The use of deterministic encoding can mitigate issues arising out of the use of non-preferred serializations specially crafted by an attacker. However, this effect only accrues if the decoder actually checks that deterministic encoding was applied correctly. More generally, additional security properties of deterministic encoding can rely on this check being performed properly.

IANA Considerations RFC Editor: please replace RFCXXXX with the RFC number of this RFC and remove this note. This document requests IANA to register the contents of into the registry "" of : New control operators to be registered

Name	Reference
.cde	[RFCXXXX]
.cdeseq	[RFCXXXX]

References Normative References The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a data format whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small code size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the need for version negotiation. These design goals make it different from earlier binary serializations such as ASN.1 and MessagePack. This document obsoletes RFC 7049, providing editorial improvements, new details, and errata fixes while keeping full compatibility with the interchange format of RFC 7049. It does not create a new version of the format. IEEE This document proposes a notational convention to express Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) data structures (RFC 7049). Its main goal is to provide an easy and unambiguous way to express structures for protocol messages and data formats that use CBOR or JSON. IANA In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the defined special meanings. Informative References Universität Bremen TZI CBOR (STD 94, RFC 8949) defines "Deterministically Encoded CBOR" in its Section 4.2. The present document provides additional information about use cases, deployment considerations, and implementation choices for Deterministic Encoding. Blockchain Commons Blockchain Commons Universität Bremen TZI The purpose of determinism is to ensure that semantically equivalent data items are encoded into identical byte streams. CBOR (RFC 8949) defines "Deterministically Encoded CBOR" in its Section 4.2, but leaves some important choices up to the application developer. The CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding (CDE) Internet Draft builds on this by specifying a baseline for application profiles that wish to implement deterministic encoding with CBOR. The present document provides an application profile "dCBOR" that can be used to help achieve interoperable deterministic encoding based on CDE for a variety of applications wishing an even narrower and clearly defined set of choices.

Implementers' Checklists This appendix is informative. It provides brief checklists that implementers can use to check their implementations. It uses language, specifically the keyword MUST, to highlight the specific items that implementers may want to check. It does not contain any normative mandates. This appendix is informative. Notes:

• This is largely a restatement of parts of Section of RFC 8949 . The purpose of the restatement is to aid the work of implementers, not to redefine anything.
• Duplicate map keys are never valid in CBOR at all (see list item "Major type 5" in Section of RFC 8949 ) no matter what sort of serialization is used. Of the various strategies listed in Section of RFC 8949 , detecting duplicates and handling them as an error instead of passing invalid data to the application is the most robust one; achieving this level of robustness is a mark of quality of implementation.
• Preferred serialization and CDE only affect serialization. They do not place any requirements, exclusions, mappings or such on the data model level. Application profiles such as dCBOR are different as they can affect the data model by restricting some values and ranges.
• CBOR decoders in general are not required to check for preferred serialization or CDE and reject inputs that do not do not fulfill their requirements. However, in an environment that employs deterministic encoding, this negates many of its benefits. Decoder implementations that advertise "support" for preferred serialization or CDE need to check the encoding and reject input that is not encoded to the encoding specification in use. Again, application profiles such as dCBOR may pose additional requirements, such as requiring rejection of non-conforming inputs. If a generic decoder needs to be used that does not "support" CDE, a simple (but somewhat clumsy) way to check for proper CDE encoding is to re-encode the decoded data and check for bit-to-bit equality with the original input.

Preferred Serialization In the following, the abbreviation "ai" will be used for the 5-bit additional information field in the first byte of an encoded CBOR data item, which follows the 3-bit field for the major type.

Preferred Serialization Encoders

1. Shortest-form encoding of the argument MUST be used for all major types. Major type 7 is used for floating-point and simple values; floating point values have its specific rules for how the shortest form is derived for the argument. The shortest form encoding for any argument that is not a floating point value is:
   • 0 to 23 and -1 to -24 MUST be encoded in the same byte as the major type.
   • 24 to 255 and -25 to -256 MUST be encoded only with an additional byte (ai = 0x18).
   • 256 to 65535 and -257 to -65536 MUST be encoded only with an additional two bytes (ai = 0x19).
   • 65536 to 4294967295 and -65537 to -4294967296 MUST be encoded only with an additional four bytes (ai = 0x1a).
2. If maps or arrays are emitted, they MUST use definite-length encoding (never indefinite-length).
3. If text or byte strings are emitted, they MUST use definite-length encoding (never indefinite-length).
4. If floating-point numbers are emitted, the following apply:
   • The length of the argument indicates half (binary16, ai = 0x19), single (binary32, ai = 0x1a) and double (binary64, ai = 0x1b) precision encoding. If multiple of these encodings preserve the precision of the value to be encoded, only the shortest form of these MUST be emitted. That is, encoders MUST support half-precision and single-precision floating point. Positive and negative infinity and zero MUST be represented in half-precision floating point.
   • NaNs, and thus NaN payloads MUST be supported. As with all floating point numbers, NaNs with payloads MUST be reduced to the shortest of double, single or half precision that preserves the NaN payload. The reduction is performed by removing the rightmost N bits of the payload, where N is the difference in the number of bits in the significand (mantissa) between the original format and the reduced format. The reduction is performed only (preserves the value only) if all the rightmost bits removed are zero. (This will always reduce a double or single quiet NaN with a zero NaN payload to a half-precision quiet NaN.)

Preferred Serialization Decoders

1. Decoders MUST accept shortest-form encoded arguments.
2. If arrays or maps are supported, definite-length arrays or maps MUST be accepted.
3. If text or byte strings are supported, definite-length text or byte strings MUST be accepted.
4. If floating-point numbers are supported, the following apply:
   • Half-precision values MUST be accepted.
   • Double- and single-precision values SHOULD be accepted; leaving these out is only foreseen for decoders that need to work in exceptionally constrained environments.
   • If double-precision values are accepted, single-precision values MUST be accepted.
   • NaNs, and thus NaN payloads, MUST be accepted.

CDE

CDE Encoders

1. CDE encoders MUST only emit CBOR fulfilling the preferred serialization rules ().
2. CDE encoders MUST sort maps by the CBOR representation of the map key. The sorting is byte-wise lexicographic order of the encoded map key data items.
3. CDE encoders MUST generate CBOR that fulfills basic validity (Section of RFC 8949 ). Note that this includes not emitting duplicate keys in a major type 5 map as well as emitting only valid UTF-8 in major type 3 text strings.

CDE Decoders The term "CDE Decoder" is a shorthand for a CBOR decoder that advertises supporting CDE (see the start of this appendix).

1. CDE decoders MUST follow the rules for preferred serialization decoders ().
2. CDE decoders MUST check for ordering map keys and for basic validity of the CBOR encoding (see Section of RFC 8949 , which includes a check against duplicate map keys and invalid UTF-8).

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this document was based on the work of Wolf McNally and Christopher Allen as documented in ; more recent revisions of that document now make use of the present document and the concept of Application Profile. We would like to explicitly acknowledge that this work has contributed greatly to shaping the concept of a CBOR Common Deterministic Encoding and Application Profiles on top of that.

Contributors Security Theory LLC

lgl@securitytheory.com

Laurence provided the text that became .