Single-Valued Attributes Proposal

All,

CMS defines the syntaxes for attributes as follows:

   AuthAttribute ::= SEQUENCE {
     attrType OBJECT IDENTIFIER,
     critical BOOLEAN DEFAULT FALSE,
     attrValues SET OF AttributeValue }

   UnauthAttribute ::= SEQUENCE {
     attrType OBJECT IDENTIFIER,
     attrValues SET OF AttributeValue }

In both cases, attrValues is a SET OF AttributeValue (i.e. ANY).

CMS states that the contentType, messageDigest, and signingTime attributes
must have a single attribute value.  CMS states that the counterSignature
attribute may have multiple attribute values.  ESS and MSG don't include any
statements for the attributes defined in those specs.

Propose that all attribute types MUST must have a single attribute value
except for counterSignature (for backwards compatibility purposes). This
requires additional text to be added to ESS and MSG.  I will include
detailed comments in my comments to the ESS and MSG specs.

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John Pawling, jsp(_at_)jgvandyke(_dot_)com                             
J.G. Van Dyke & Associates, Inc.   
www.jgvandyke.com         
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