pkcs11 — archive

[Robert Burns]

Title: RE: [pkcs11] CKA_PUBLIC_KEY_INFO Peter, Sorry for the late response -- traveling. I understand now where you're coming from. So a couple of follow up statements and then perhaps this will be a discussion that needs to happen 'out-of-band'? I'm having difficulty imagining other use cases where a user will only have access to the private key, yet needs access to the public bits as well. I do understand your experiences with tokens which fit this mold, but the error (it seems) is in the fact that the token distributors were not also including the public key object as well? Seems like we're hacking P11 to make up for the deficiencies in how someone decided to deploy their tokens. Again, I don't doubt that this is a real problem that you're facing, just not sure if this is one which P11 needs to solve? Secondly, I'm still feeling like adding SPKI to a private key object is not keeping within the spirit of P11 objects -- the public key bits should be on a separate object (yes, I know RSA is the exception in this case, but it is only a single attribute (public exp) and relatively small). Putting in a marshaled form of the public key bits is relatively straight forward, but introduces ambiguities, etc. For example, how much time will pass before people start asking for the ability to do signature verifications using the SPKI info on a key? One of the purposes of having two unique objects in P11 for asymmetric keys was to be able to support different permission attributes, as well as different user ACLs. By shoving everything (even marshaled and 'opaque') onto a private object introduces a number of *potential* ambiguities which will become more difficult to manage going forward. I definitely understand where you're coming from, and I'm trying to take a pragmatic view, but at some point we do have to honor the P11 model or else we end up with an unmanageable specification. So is the problem really that there are definite cryptographic reasons for needing the public key attributes on a private key, or is this just a convenient way to solve the problem that token vendors have introduced by not providing enough objects on their tokens? Thanks, Bob