Re: What we were using public key authentication for

On 30 March 2016 at 18:23, Dave Longley <dlongley@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> On 03/30/2016 12:09 PM, Graham Leggett wrote:
>
>> On 30 Mar 2016, at 6:00 PM, Dave Longley <dlongley@digitalbazaar.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> As a quick, temporary replacement for keygen, you should be able to
>>> use forge (or forge + WebCrypto) to generate a keypair and wrap it
>>> in a PKCS#12 container that can be downloaded via a link that, when
>>> clicked, may bring up an import dialog in the user's browser. They
>>> may have to save the file first before importing, I'm not sure.
>>>
>>> forge: https://github.com/digitalbazaar/forge
>>>
>>> There's some somewhat messy X.509 cert creation and PKCS#12 code
>>> that could be adapted from this issue:
>>>
>>> https://github.com/digitalbazaar/forge/issues/211#issuecomment-85447100
>>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Does this guarantee that the key was a) generated on the client side
>>  only (and not anywhere else and injected into the conversation), and
>>  b) that this key cannot be subsequently exported and uploaded to
>> some third party location under the control of third party server
>> code?
>>
>
> The short answer is "No", as there is presently no direct replacement
> for keygen. I was just offering a quick temporary fix. If it's true that
> keygen has now been removed (not just deprecated), I would expect that
> systems that relied upon it need *something* that they can throw
> together quickly in the interim (meaning, until some other replacement
> can solve their problem long term).
>

As I understand it keygen is NOT removed in firefox (or most versions of
other browsers).  What I heard (perhaps someone will confirm) is that
Mozilla will take the TAG advice, to remove existing functionality that is
in use, only after it has been adequately replaced.


>
> The longer answer is that the key pair is, in fact, generated
> client-side, however, using code that is controlled by the website. That
> site must be trusted not to do anything nefarious with the private key
> while the site has access to it. Once the key pair has been exported to
> a PKCS#12 and imported into the user's local key store, and the site has
> been navigated away from, the website has no access to the private key,
> should, for example, the site become compromised in the future.
>
>
>
> --
> Dave Longley
> CTO
> Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> http://digitalbazaar.com
>