RFC 7515, "JSON Web Signature (JWS)", May 2015

Errata ID: 7767
Status: Reported
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: Jeffrey Yasskin
Date Reported: 2024-01-17

Section 6 says:

These Header Parameters MUST
   be integrity protected if the information that they convey is to be
   utilized in a trust decision; however, if the only information used
   in the trust decision is a key, these parameters need not be
   integrity protected, since changing them in a way that causes a
   different key to be used will cause the validation to fail.

It should say:

These Header Parameters MUST
   be integrity protected if the information that they convey is to be
   utilized in a trust decision.

Notes:

See the discussion for https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata/eid7719 at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/jose/I3_IuEfFSyiHWap7Pyn1BFAb4QM/. The deleted text is incorrect for both signature schemes and encryption schemes.

You could consider adding text like "Note that some algorithms allow multiple keys to validate or decrypt the same signature or encrypted data." to prevent readers from making the same bad assumption as the original RFC authors, but it doesn't seem necessary if doing so is contentious. Similarly, it's probably ok to simply delete the whole "Original Text" if that seems better to the reviewers.

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