> I don't care what you throw in the bytes; I do think whoever is coming up with the scheme for assembling those bytes should care a lot. Specifically, wheneve

> I don't care what you throw in the bytes; I do think whoever is coming up with the scheme for assembling those bytes should care a lot. Specifically, whenever you're signing something, you have to pay attention to whether that something still has exploitable ambiguities. Most of those come from how you delineate the fields in the thing you're signing, which is a classic "you find out what you missed when someone sends you a CVE" type of problem. So you're right back to the problem of "if not JSON or XML then you're still rolling your own." I agree with "reach for symmetric" in this sense: what are you trying to accomplish? Prove the data came from a specific source or that they are who they claim to be? Can you just use TLS with mutual auth? Prove the data came from yourself? Symmetric is probably okay. When you need verifiable attestations of data from parties that don't talk to each other... welcome to the jungle.