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82 lines
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82 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
signify - sign and verify
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One of the things OpenBSD has never done is sign releases, for whatever
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reasons. But 2014 is a new year, time to make a change. The first thing
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you need to start signing OS releases (besides the release itself) is a
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signing tool. Other projects use a variety of tools for this, but
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unfortunately none of them were invented here. signify is a small tool I
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wrote to fill that gap. Here's a few notes about it, working from the
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top down.
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There are only two useful portmanteaus to be made from the words sign
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and verify. Verisign charges a lot of money, so we went with the free
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option.
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The UI/UX is pretty spartan. It does lots of error checking, but makes
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no effort at error recovery. Early versions of signify refused to
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overwrite existing files, based on the theory that we're going to stick
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this in a careful workflow and not make mistakes; i.e., overwriting a
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signature file by signing the same file twice indicates the workflow has
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failed. This was later changed, based on feedback from the poor souls
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who had to use the thing.
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The signify file format is also really simple. At its core, it consists
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of a two byte algorithm identifier ("Ed") and the signature or key data,
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plus a bit more data in secret keys to support encrypting them. The core
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data is base64 encoded (so you don't poke your eye out) and appended
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after a one line comment. The comment is ignored and just there so you
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can tell the files apart if you accidentally rename them.
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Initially, I resisted adding identifiers to the keys. One way signature
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schemes break is user error, as in the evil people trick the user into
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believing their evil key is legit. By omitting identifying information,
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you can't be tricked into believing a key is OpenBSD official just
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because it says "OpenBSD official". Does this matter? Probably not, but
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since signify itself would never use such identifiers for verification,
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there wasn't any reason to add them. Soon after we started using signify
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however, we had too many keys running around and so a compromise was
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reached: keys have 64-bit random fingerprints to enable differentiation
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between the data being compromised and the wrong key being used. (I
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think we would have been ok without the identifiers eventually; it was
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only that first week with people experimenting and also the version
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changing from 5.4 to 5.5 when we were drowning in keys. Once more of the
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process was worked out, things settled down and key mismatches went
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away.)
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Moving on to the fun crypto bits, we wanted a tool that would fit on
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installation media, which meant minimizing code size and external
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dependencies.
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-rw-r--r-- 1 anonftp wheel 1474560 Jul 30 12:27 floppy54.fs
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-rw-r--r-- 1 anonftp wheel 2728452 Jul 22 18:40 gnupg-2.0.19p3.tgz
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The one and only supported algorithm is Ed25519. It has a lot of very
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nice properties, though I really like the deterministic signatures.
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Anything that makes it harder to screw up is great. The implementation,
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currently built by reaching over into the ssh directory, is small and
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independent with a simple interface that's hard to screw up.
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Ed25519 keys are really small. This makes them easy to work with. Public
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keys, in particular, are only 32 bytes. With some additional data
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signify adds and base64 encoded, the relevant figure is still 56 bytes,
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small enough to fit on a tshirt or even the back of your hand.
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I did run into one downside in the Ed25519 implementation interface. It
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signs messages by creating a complete copy of the message. Verification
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creates another complete copy of the message. The rationale for this
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decision is pretty obvious: You sign a message and get back a
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(theoretically opaque) string which you transmit; then the receiver
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verifies it to get back the original message. You can't accidentally use
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a message that fails verification because they are transmitted as part
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of the same bundle. Unfortunately, this design works better for small
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network packets than large files. We would prefer to keep the signatures
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detached from the message (this means it's now our responsibility to not
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accidentally use an unverified message.) signify deals with this
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internally by creating lots of copies. In the future we may open up the
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implementation for surgery, but that voids the manufacturer's warranty,
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so for now we're using the code exactly as it is with the workarounds in
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our code.
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--Ted Unangst
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(excerpted from http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/signify)
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