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Evaluate cryptography in use and decide what we will support #390

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cdata opened this issue May 16, 2023 · 1 comment
Open

Evaluate cryptography in use and decide what we will support #390

cdata opened this issue May 16, 2023 · 1 comment
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Enhancement New user-facing feature Topic: Privacy This issue is related to user privacy Topic: Security This issue is related to the security properties of our offering

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@cdata
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cdata commented May 16, 2023

Currently we make wide use of ed25519 keys (via ed25519-zebra), except on the web where we use RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 (via the Web Crypto API).

ed25519 has various virtues (small public key size, speedy verification time among them), but also comes with some baggage:

Both ed25519 keys and Web Crypto RSA keys are supported "out of the box" in the rs-ucan project, which is the basis for using these as the defaults in Noosphere.

For CID hashing, we currently use blake2b-256 everywhere. Blake2b's main virtue is its speed compared to most plausible alternatives.

Recently, there was some thought provoking discussion of the default schemes used in Bluesky: https://staging.bsky.app/profile/gtank.bsky.social/post/3jvsidg6mgh2f
And less recently, some discussion on Bluesky about usage of the BLAKE3 hash by n0 computer: https://staging.bsky.app/profile/b5.bsky.social/post/3jv2zaqze5s2x (see also this screencast).

This issue is intended to kick off a discussion weighing the pros and cons of our default cryptography in use before we get too comfy with our priors. Some provocations to kick off the discussion:

  • There is compelling evidence that we should switch to BLAKE3 for hashing; what is the counter-arguement?
  • Compatibility across ed25519 implementations seems like it could be a real problem; is it worth blessing a (possibly less popular / less available) alternative as our favored default?
@cdata cdata added Enhancement New user-facing feature Topic: Privacy This issue is related to user privacy Topic: Security This issue is related to the security properties of our offering labels May 16, 2023
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cdata commented Jun 1, 2023

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Labels
Enhancement New user-facing feature Topic: Privacy This issue is related to user privacy Topic: Security This issue is related to the security properties of our offering
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