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Forward secure sealingForward secure sealingPosted Aug 25, 2012 1:37 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: Forward secure sealing by nybble41 Parent article: Forward secure sealing
please point me at the technology that lets you tell which key a message is signed with given only the signature and the verification key?
Even if you can do this, you still have the question of how do you know that message should have been signed by key 20 instead of key 2000, or better still, how it should have been signed by key 934503459 instead of 934505459.
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Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 1:43 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> please point me at the technology that lets you tell which key a message is signed with given only the signature and the verification key?
This is an honest question. this seems like it would be a breakthrough in non-reputiation if you can sign one message with a key and send it to person A, a second with the next key and send it to person B and a third with the next key and send it to person C and therefor prove that message B was send between message A and message C
As far as I know, all signing services currently boil down to "we include the timestamp in what we sign, and since you trust our signature, you trust the timestamp", with the trust in the signature being that you trust that nobody else is able to sign anything that can be verified with the verification key you have.
It's very possible that I am ignorant of some digital signing technology here, but this seems like such a useful combination of features that I would have expected to have heard that such things are at least possible, even without knowing the details.
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 2:05 UTC (Sat) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> please point me at the technology that lets you tell which key a message is signed with given only the signature and the verification key?
In this scheme you already know which key the message should have been signed with, so you only need to check that one key. However, if all else fails you could generate every signing key from the verification key up to the present and calculate the message hash for each key, checking it against the provided signature.
> Even if you can do this, you still have the question of how do you know that message should have been signed by key 20 instead of key 2000, or better still, how it should have been signed by key 934503459 instead of 934505459.
I already answered this at least twice. The initial time t0 and key change interval are known. The message includes a timestamp t[m]. If it was really logged at that time, the signing key will be K[floor((t[m]-t0)/interval)].
Since the question has come up, the logging system knows t0 and n in addition to K[n], and rotates keys however many times are necessary after downtime until n is correct for the timestamp of the next log entry.
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 2:11 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I'm still trying to find out how you can know which key was used to sign this. remember that you are using the same validation key to check every signature.
You seem to know about this technology, can you point me at a paper on it?
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 2:14 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
You simply take the initial key and do N key derivations, where N is the number of key regeneration intervals since the initial generation and the desired timestamp.
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 2:19 UTC (Sat) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
I give you a precise formula for calculating the expected signing key from the validation key, initial time and message timestamp, and you reply that you still can't tell which key was used to sign which message. Clearly we have a communication problem, but I don't have any idea how to bridge the gap.
As for "knowing this technology", I have no idea how systemd actually implements this. I only presented one possible implementation based on the design requirements. Obviously, since I made the implementation up on the spot, I can't point you to any papers; everything there is to know is in this thread.
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 3:27 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
Ok, the formula you provided will work to generate a symmetric key, Simply using the "verification key" as a seed for a PRNG will do that much (and since the sequence will be unique, walking through the sequence until you find something that matches will work)
However, I was assuming that this was some form of asymmetric key, since that's the norm for signing something. The problem with using a symmetric key is that the person trying to validate the signature is also in a position to forge the signature.
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 3:41 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, this approach would result in pretty unusable validations for a system that's been running a long time.
if you are on key 9834750927 and need to iterate through that key generation routing that many times to get you from the starting validation key to the key needed to validate the file, it's going to take a long time.
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 4:54 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
You can adapt this for public/private keys as well.
And you can easily walk through the keys. If you do log sealing every minute then key 9834750927 would be some time after 20711.
Given that AES on modern CPU works can produce about 1Gb of data per second, it'll take only a few minutes to walk to that point.
Forward secure sealing Posted Aug 25, 2012 19:00 UTC (Sat) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> The problem with using a symmetric key is that the person trying to validate the signature is also in a position to forge the signature.
Yes, but that doesn't matter here, since the person doing the validation is also the person who administers the server; they're _already_ in a position to forge log messages, if they cared to do so.
You are correct that the signing key is basically just the output from a PRNG, but the PRNG does need to have a special property that some PRNGs lack: the computation must only work in the forward direction. Given the internal state of the PRNG, it must not be possible to go back to a previous state and generate a past signing key.
For example, both the following functions will produce a stream of pseudo-random numbers:
F[0] = HASH(seed)
G[n] = HASH(seed + n)
However, only the former PRNG would be suitable, because computing G[n] requires the original seed value, and given the seed you can compute any G[n], past or future.
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