Hi,

reading what RFC9200, it is not fully clear whether the client is
allowed to set request a particular ACE profile (eg. by sending
ace_profile=2), or whether the only choice the client has in that is
whether or not to ask the AS to send which profile the AS picked (by
sending ace_profile=null) in the C-AS message. The document talks a lot
about the null value being allowed in requests (section 5.8.1. and
5.8.4.3.), but neither allows nor forbids regular values.

This has led to some disagreement on [1], which I originally intended to
clarify by filing an erratum -- but I wouldn't even know what to put in
as proposed text.

Note that with the profiles I currently know, there's not a lot of
chance for ambiguity; for example, if a client supports both the
ACE-OSCORE profile and the ACE-EDHOC-OSCORE profile, it will either send
an almost empty token request (for OSCORE), or a token request with its
own cnf set (for EDHOC), so the AS will have a good idea already, but
that's basically just a furtunate coincidence; as more profiles get
added, the space for requests that could be ambiguous grows.

While in most cases it likely makes sense for the AS to decide the
profile, I think it does make good sense for the client to pick one
profile or the other in some cases (eg. depending on power available,
expected connection duration or round-trip time), within what the AS
considers acceptable.

Is there text we missed in RFC9200 that would clarify this one way or
the other, or is this indeed unclear, and then, what's the intended
design?

BR
Christian

[1]: https://github.com/namib-project/dcaf-rs/issues/28

-- 
To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.
  -- Bene Gesserit axiom

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