Re: pgcrypto: PGP signatures

From: Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
Cc: Marko Tiikkaja <marko(at)joh(dot)to>, Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com>, Joel Jacobson <joel(at)trustly(dot)com>, Thomas Munro <munro(at)ip9(dot)org>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: pgcrypto: PGP signatures
Date: 2014-09-12 18:22:24
Message-ID: 20140912182224.GA11812@toroid.org
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(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(at)2ndquadrant(dot)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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