I'm using python and cryptography.io to sign and verify messages. I can get a DER-encoded bytes representation of a signature with:
cryptography_priv_key.sign(message, hash_function)
...per this document: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/hazmat/primitives/asymmetric/ec/
A DER-encoded ECDSA Signature from a 256-bit curve is, at most, 72 bytes; see: ECDSA signature length
However, depending on the values of r and s, it can also be 70 or 71 bytes. Indeed, if I examine length of the output of this function, it varies from 70-72. Do I have that right so far?
I can decode the signature to ints r and s. These are both apparently 32 bytes, but it's not clear to me whether that will always be so.
Is it safe to cast these two ints to bytes and send them over the wire, with the intention of encoding them again on the other side?
The simple answer is, yes, they will always be 32 bytes.
The more complete answer is that it depends on the curve. For example, a 256-bit curve has an order of 256-bits. Similarly, a 128-bit curve only has an order of 128-bits.
You can divide this number by eight to find the size of r and s.
It gets more complicated when curves aren't divisible by eight, like secp521r1 where the order is a 521-bit number.
In this case, we round up. 521 / 8 is 65.125, thus it requires that we free 66 bytes of memory to fit this number.
It is safe to send them over the wire and encode them again as long as you keep track of which is r and s.