Re: [pkcs11] Groups - Draft outline and conformance section for PKCS #11 V2.40 Base Specification uploaded

["Griffin, Robert" <robert.griffin@rsa.com>]

I'll add the topic to today's agenda.

Regards,

Bob


----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Gutmann [mailto:pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:57 PM
To: pkcs11@lists.oasis-open.org <pkcs11@lists.oasis-open.org>; Griffin, Robert
Subject: Re: [pkcs11] Groups - Draft outline and conformance section  for PKCS #11 V2.40 Base Specification uploaded

Another issue I'd like to raise (which didn't come up during the previous
meeting, but some of it does fall under the buggy-implementation area) is that
ECC handling is a mess.  From the wiki:

  The way ECC support is currently handled is awful. First, applications need
  to check a whole slew of CKF_EC_xxx flags to check whether the general type
  of curve that they want is supported. After that it's basically guesswork,
  if you want to use (say) the near-universal NIST P256 then after checking
  all the flags to see whether named Fp curves are supported the only way to
  tell whether you can actually do P256 is to encode an ASN.1 OID for that
  curve (!!!), set it as CKA_EC_PARAMS for an object, and then see whether you
  can perform an operation with the resulting object. As far as I can see the
  only way to use this is to hope that the more common curves are supported
  and fail if not.

  This area needs a serious cleanup. There should be some means of querying
  whether standard curves are supported that only requires querying a CKC_xxx
  ('C' = curve) value, i.e. "is CKC_NIST_P256 supported?") without having to
  check assorted flags and then performing probing to see whether you can
  actually use that curve.

To give an example of what things are like for users, I'm currently using an
ECC implementation that claims to do signatures but not signature verification
(so I kind of have to take it on faith that if I see a signing key and
associated cert, that the cert is actually valid), claims not to do NIST named
curves (via the CKF_EC_xxx flags) but comes with sample code that uses them,
and returns the catch-all template-inconsistent if I try and use the template
given in the PKCS #11 spec.

(As an aside, if anyone has a PKCS #11 ECC implementation that actually works
and runs under Windows, I'd like to be able to play with it in order to build
some test code to exercise PKCS #11 ECC functionality).

Peter.