Re: pgcrypto: PGP signatures - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Abhijit Menon-Sen
Subject Re: pgcrypto: PGP signatures
Date
Msg-id 20140912182224.GA11812@toroid.org
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: pgcrypto: PGP signatures  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>)
Responses Re: pgcrypto: PGP signatures
List pgsql-hackers
(I have't read the patch, or even earlier correspondence in this
thread, so I apologise for just jumping in.)

At 2014-09-12 12:50:45 -0300, alvherre@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
>
> +1 for ignoring sigs.  If somebody want to check sigs, that's a
> separate step. 

For what it's worth, although it seems logical to split up cryptographic
primitives like this, I think it's widely recognised these days to have
contributed to plenty of bad crypto implementations. These seems to be
general trend of moving towards higher-level interfaces that require
fewer decisions and can be relied upon do the Right Thing.

I don't like the idea of ignoring signature verification errors any more
than I would like "if somebody wants to check the HMAC before decypting,
that's a separate step".

Of course, all that is an aside. If the function ever threw an error on
signature verification failures, I would strongly object to changing it
to ignore such errors for exactly the reasons you mention already.

-- Abhijit



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