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Subject: RE: [pkcs11] CKA_PUBLIC_KEY_INFO
"Burns, Robert"
<Robert.Burns@thalesesec.com> writes:
>You are proposing this mechanism to fix the issue of non-RSA
keys not having
>the appropriate public bits, rather than the mechanism for
tying the keys
>together with a cert? (e.g. the ECDSA private key
issue...)
Absolutely. The "tying keys together" seems to have gotten
added later, but
it was never the original intent, which was to fix the problem that
if you
have a token with a private key object that's anything but RSA then
you pretty
much can't use it because you can't get the public key for
it. The most
obvious example of this is that you can't get a certificate for the
key
because the CSR requires the public-key components.
>If my interpretation is correct, shouldn't this be solved
similar to how the
>RSA private key handles it? That is, but requiring the
public key attributes
>on the object too?
Yes, but it evolved over time:
Step 1: Slightly abuse the derive functionality to get a public-key
object
from the private-key object.
Objection: It's a bit of a misuse of derive, and in any case we
don't need all
that, just the public components.
Step 2: Add public-key values to private-key objects.
Objection: Since the only real need for them is as
subjectPublicKeyInfo for
certificates, why not just return the SPKI directly?
Step 3: Add SPKI as an attribute.
>Finally, tangent to our DER discussion, using these public key
blobs on the
>private keys would then REQUIRE all tokens be able to DER
decode them to make
>effective use of the public bits, contradicting the assertion
that most
>tokens won't need to DER decode anything.
There's no need to decode them since the token never uses them,
they're there
purely for the convenience of PKCS #11-using applications. In
fact there's no
need to store them at all, you just generate the SPKI on the fly
from whatever
public-key data you have in the token.
Peter.
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