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Applications and Real-Time CBOR CBOR (STD 94, RFC 8949) defines "Deterministically Encoded CBOR" in its Section 4.2. The present document provides the application profile "dCBOR" that can be used with Deterministic Encoding. 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 (, also RFC 8949) defines "Deterministically Encoded CBOR" in its Section 4.2. The present document provides the application profile "dCBOR" that can be used with Deterministic Encoding.

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.

Application Profile The dCBOR Application Profile specifies the use of Deterministic Encoding as defined in (see also for more information) together with some application-level rules specified in this section. The application-level rules specified here do not "fork" CBOR. A dCBOR 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. Similarly, generic CBOR encoders will be able to produce valid dCBOR if handed dCBOR conforming data model level information from an application. Please note that the separation between standard CBOR processing and the processing required by the dCBOR application profile is a conceptual one: Both dCBOR processing and standard CBOR processing can be combined into a special dCBOR/CBOR encoder/decoder. This application profile is intended to be used in conjunction with an application, which typically will use a subset of CBOR, which in turn influences which subset of the application profile is used. As a result, this application profile places no direct requirement on what subset of CBOR is implemented. For instance, there is no requirement that dCBOR implementations 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.

Numeric reduction dCBOR implementations that do support floating point numbers MUST perform the following two reductions of numeric values when constructing CBOR data items:

1. When representing integral floating point values (floating point values with a zero fractional part), check whether the mathematically identical value can be represented as a basic (major type 0/1) integer value. If that is the case, convert the integral floating point to that mathematically identical integer value before encoding it. (Deterministic Encoding will then ensure the shortest length encoding is used.) This means that if a floating point value has a non-zero fractional part, or an exponent that takes it out of the range of basic integers, the original floating point value is used for encoding. (Specifically, conversion to a bignum is never considered.) This also means that the three representations of a zero number in CBOR (0, 0.0, -0.0 in diagnostic notation) are all reduced to the basic integer 0 (with preferred encoding 0x00). Note that this reduction can turn valid maps into invalid ones, as it can create duplicate keys, e.g., for: This means that, at the application level, the application MUST prevent the creation of maps that would turn invalid in dCBOR processing.
2. In addition, represent all NaN values by using the quiet NaN value having the half-width CBOR representation 0xf97e00 before encoding.

dCBOR-based applications MUST accept these "reduced" numbers in place of the original value, e.g., a dCBOR-based application that expects a floating point value needs to accept a basic integer value in its place (and, if needed, convert it to a floating point value for further processing). dCBOR-based applications MUST NOT accept numbers that have not been reduced as specified in this section, except maybe by making the unreduced numbers available for their diagnostic value when there has been an explicit request to do so. This is similar to a checking flag mentioned in Section 5.1 (API Considerations) of being set by default.

Implementation Status (Boilerplate as per :) This section records the status of known implementations of the protocol defined by this specification at the time of posting of this Internet-Draft, and is based on a proposal described in . The description of implementations in this section is intended to assist the IETF in its decision processes in progressing drafts to RFCs. Please note that the listing of any individual implementation here does not imply endorsement by the IETF. Furthermore, no effort has been spent to verify the information presented here that was supplied by IETF contributors. This is not intended as, and must not be construed to be, a catalog of available implementations or their features. Readers are advised to note that other implementations may exist. According to , "this will allow reviewers and working groups to assign due consideration to documents that have the benefit of running code, which may serve as evidence of valuable experimentation and feedback that have made the implemented protocols more mature. It is up to the individual working groups to use this information as they see fit".

TypeScript

• Implementation Location:
• Primary Maintainer:
• Languages: TypeScript (transpiles to JavaScript)
• Coverage:
• Testing:
• Licensing:

Swift

• Implementation Location:
• Primary Maintainer:
• Languages: Swift
• Coverage:
• Testing:
• Licensing: BSD-2-Clause-Patent

Rust

• Implementation Location:
• Primary Maintainer:
• Languages: Rust
• Coverage:
• Testing:
• Licensing: Custom

Ruby

• Implementation Location:
• Primary Maintainer: Carsten Bormann
• Languages: Ruby
• Coverage: Complete specification; complemented by CBOR encoder/decoder and command line interface from and deterministic encoding from
• Testing:
• Licensing: Apache-2.0

Security Considerations TODO Security

IANA Considerations This document has no IANA actions.

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. 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 CBOR has many advantages over other data serialization formats. One of its strengths is specifications and guidelines for serializing data deterministically, such that multiple agents serializing the same data automatically achieve consensus on the exact byte-level form of that serialized data. Nonetheless, determinism is an opt-in feature of the specification, and most existing CBOR codecs put the primary burden of correct deterministic serialization and validation of deterministic encoding during deserialization on the engineer. This document specifies a set of norms and practices for CBOR codec implementors intended to support deterministic CBOR ("dCBOR") at the codec API level. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. This document describes a simple process that allows authors of Internet-Drafts to record the status of known implementations by including an Implementation Status section. This will allow reviewers and working groups to assign due consideration to documents that have the benefit of running code, which may serve as evidence of valuable experimentation and feedback that have made the implemented protocols more mature. This process is not mandatory. Authors of Internet-Drafts are encouraged to consider using the process for their documents, and working groups are invited to think about applying the process to all of their protocol specifications. This document obsoletes RFC 6982, advancing it to a Best Current Practice.

Acknowledgments This document is based on the work of Wolf McNally and Christopher Allen as documented in and discussed in 2023 in the CBOR working group.

Contributors Blockchain Commons

wolf@wolfmcnally.com

Blockchain Commons

christophera@lifewithalacrity.com