I’m not up to speed on JWE, but read this in RFC 7516:
The following members are defined for use in the JSON objects that
are elements of the "recipients" array:
header
The "header" member MUST be present and contain the value JWE Per-
Recipient Unprotected Header when the JWE Per-Recipient
Unprotected Header value is non-empty; otherwise, it MUST be
absent. This value is represented as an unencoded JSON object,
rather than as a string. These Header Parameter values are not
integrity protected.
Is it really true that in JWE the per-recipient headers are never protected by
what ever public key scheme is used by a particular recipient? This seems a
worse security hole than the lamps attack. Hopefully I’m missing something.
Said another way, it seems that JWE doesn’t have an equivalent of the
COSE_Encrypt or COSE_Recipient structure.
LL
> On Jun 24, 2025, at 1:07 AM, Hannes Tschofenig
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> the JOSE and COSE chairs have issued a working group last call on the two
> HPKE drafts. Most of the content has been aligned, as far as the structural
> differences between COSE and JOSE allow.
>
> However, there are some noteworthy differences between the two drafts:
>
> - The COSE-HPKE draft introduces a new CBOR structure called
> Recipient_structure, which is passed into the Additional Authenticated Data
> (AAD) field of the HPKE invocation. This structure contains the protected
> headers from the COSE_recipient (if present) as well as fixed fields, such as
> the algorithm used in the next layer.
>
> - The JOSE-HPKE draft does not define an equivalent structure. It basically
> leaves it up to a profile of the draft (or to the developer) to define the
> inforrmation it wants to incorporate.
>
> Both drafts support the inclusion of mutually known private information via
> the info field in HPKE. Additionally, each draft offers different extension
> points for passing additional data into the AAD and info fields.
>
> I believe further alignment between the two documents would be beneficial.
>
> Ciao
> Hannes
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