On 17.01.2022 17:59, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 03:34:54PM +0100, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
If you're looking for a simple signature mechanism to replace the use of
X.509 and all of that infrastructure, may I suggest just coming up with
something simple using ed25519, similar to signify or minisign? Very
minimal code in the kernel, in userspace, and very few moving parts to
break.
I am concerned that ed25519 private key management is very rudimentary -- more
often than not it is just kept somewhere on disk, often without any passphrase
encryption.
With all its legacy warts, GnuPG at least has decent support for hardware
off-load via OpenPGP smartcards or TPM integration in GnuPG 2.3, but the best
we have with ed25519 is passhprase protection as implemented in minisign (and
I am not sure that I understood your point here correctly, but GnuPG
already supports ed25519 keys, including stored on a smartcard - for
example, on a YubiKey [1].
While the current software support for ed25519 might be limited, there
is certainly progress being made, RFC 8410 allowed these algos for X.509
certificates.
Support for such certificates is already implemented in OpenSSL [2].
ECDSA, on the other hand, is very fragile with respect to random number
generation at signing time.
We know that people got burned here in the past.
Thanks,
Maciej
[1]: https://developers.yubico.com/PGP/YubiKey_5.2.3_Enhancements_to_OpenPGP_3.4.html
[2]: https://blog.pinterjann.is/ed25519-certificates.html
