Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security Guidelines for Cryptographic Algorithms in the W3C Web Cryptography API

Yaron Sheffer <yaronf.ietf@gmail.com> Thu, 20 November 2014 17:48 UTC

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Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 19:48:45 +0200
From: Yaron Sheffer <yaronf.ietf@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security Guidelines for Cryptographic Algorithms in the W3C Web Cryptography API
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Hi Harry,

The draft makes for fascinating reading for CFRG folks, as can be seen 
by the mailing list discussion. But I think it does not make any sense 
to "developers" (programmers who typically have next to no understanding 
of crypto, and certainly none at all of formal security models/proofs). 
They simply would not understand 90% of the text.

So it may be fine as a rationale for the selected list of algorithms. It 
may be fine for a few star crypto developers. But IMHO, not for the 
general population of people who'll be coding to your API.

I am a co-author of the TLS BCP 
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-uta-tls-bcp-06). It certainly has 
its share of flaws, but what we did right is to clearly mark 
recommendations vs. rationale, and to simplify recommendations as much 
as we could.

Thanks,
	Yaron


>
> Everyone,
>
> As the W3C Web Cryptography API gets ready to move to Candidate
> Recommendation, we wanted to address the concerns brought up by Rich
> Salz and others for better security guidelines for developers, given
> that the API exposes a variety of algorithms. I've taken Graham Steel's
> excellent write-up, which is in a large part based on Smart et al.'s
> magisterial ENISA report,  and have turned it into a draft CFRG note.
>
> We'd like to see the security guidelines below discussed here, and if
> there's no objections after discussion, move this onwards. W3C commits
> to maintaining this note as much as possible.
>
> Links to draft:
>
> TXT:
> http://www.w3.org/2012/webcrypto/draft-irtf-cfrg-webcrypto-algorithms-00.txt
> HTML:
> http://www.w3.org/2012/webcrypto/draft-irtf-cfrg-webcrypto-algorithms-00.html
>
> cheers,
>      harry
>

[Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security Guid… Harry Halpin
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Salz, Rich
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Watson Ladd
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Jonathan Berliner
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Paul Hoffman
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Scott Fluhrer (sfluhrer)
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Yaron Sheffer
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … David Gil
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Watson Ladd
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Harry Halpin
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Yaron Sheffer
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Harry Halpin
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Harry Halpin
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Dan Brown
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Yaron Sheffer
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Dan Harkins
Re: [Cfrg] Proposed Informational Note: Security … Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard