Re: What we were using public key authentication for

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 10:09 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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).
>

Correct.



>   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.
>

I don't believe we've made any public statements to this effect. We still
intend to remove <keygen> but we don't presently have a published schedule
for it.

-Ekr


>
>>
>> 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
>>
>
>