- From: Wan-Teh Chang <wtc@google.com>
- Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:10:28 -0700
- To: Vijay Bharadwaj <Vijay.Bharadwaj@microsoft.com>
- Cc: Ryan Sleevi <sleevi@google.com>, "David McGrew (mcgrew)" <mcgrew@cisco.com>, Web Cryptography Working Group <public-webcrypto@w3.org>
On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 8:10 AM, Vijay Bharadwaj <Vijay.Bharadwaj@microsoft.com> wrote: > I see the appeal of the idea, I'm just uncomfortable with it given that experience has > shown various corner cases in which it breaks scenarios. One such corner case is > enrolling for a certificate for an RSA encryption key. You have to sign the Proof of > Possession in the certificate request with the key, and this is standard practice. > But tainting may break the scenario since either the signing or subsequent encryptions > would fail. Hmm... this corner case is thought provoking. The keyUsage attribute of the Key object alone would break this scenario. > So I guess my feeling is that tainting may be better left to the underlying platform, > and while WebCrypto can benefit from any platform capabilities in this area it > doesn't have to mandate them. Key tainting solves a security problem that's not unique to the Web Crypto API, so the Web Crypto API doesn't need to be where key tainting is implemented. If it can be done easily, I certainly support it. But the keys on removable devices such as smart cards make it hard to track the tainted state of those keys across computers. Wan-Teh
Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2012 19:10:55 UTC