14 May
2020
14 May
'20
9:08 p.m.
Hi Kevin,
The separation between the secure and non-secure world is designed to keep the code in the secure world as small as possible. I don't think there'll ever be enough justification to include base64 encoding in the secure world.
The current PSA crypto API was designed to be mostly simple wrappers around calls to the secure world. We (Arm) are considering extending it with some higher-level functions designed to remain in the normal world. This would include key formats such as SubjectPublicKeyInfo, and PEM encoding. I can't make any promises as to when or even if this will happen. At the moment, all we have to offer is the existing mbedtls functions.
--
Gilles Peskine
Mbed TLS developer and PSA crypto API designer
P.S. When I'm working on Mbed TLS and using a shell prompt to calculate
or verify values (usually with openssl or python/cryptodome), I usually
use hex/binary conversion, and DER to encode asymmetric keys.
On 14/05/2020 13:56, Kevin Townsend via psa-crypto wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Working on some cryptography demos for Zephyr, now that TF-M support
> was fully merged in for the upcoming 2.3 release, I've put some test
> code together that:
>
> - Generates a permanent persistent key (prime256v1)
> - Displays the public key based on the private key above (in hex format)
> - Calculates the SHA256 hash of a payload
> - Signs the hash with the persistent key
> - Verifies the signature using the public key
> - Destroys the key
>
> https://gist.github.com/microbuilder/a326cc6b935f87f413d89e44f9d3de05
>
> An important part of the hash/sign/verify workflow is of course
> verifying the signature on the receiving end, which requires access to
> the public key generated on the device (perhaps a new key was randomly
> generated when the device first boots, etc.).
>
> We can currently derive the public key in DER format with the existing
> API, but it seems like a helper function to convert to PEM would make
> this export process easier, since you could then just copy and paste
> the text output directly for provisioning or debug purposes.
> mbedcrypto 3.1.0 already has a library/pem.c utility function for this
> that could be exposed: mbedtls_pem_write_buffer
>
> In general, I think enabling the import and export of PEM data, not
> just DER, would make the process of dealing with keys during
> provisioning easier.
>
> I didn't find any references to PEM in the PSA Cryptography API, but
> perhaps I'm missing some obvious already existing means to convert to
> PEM, or is this something other people see any value in having?
>
> Being able to copy and paste PEM data (versus DER which can't be
> copy/pasted), then save it as a file, for example, would make working
> with openssl easier, such as the commands described here where we
> could use the extracted PEM data to verify the signed data from the
> command line:
> https://gist.github.com/microbuilder/a326cc6b935f87f413d89e44f9d3de05#file-p...
>
> Any thoughts on the idea, or perhaps it's already been added and I'm
> simply missing it?
>
> It's easy to add this at the NS application level as well, of course,
> but it does seem like a useful enough operation that it should be
> available in S world when requesting key data.
>
> Best regards,
> Kevin Townsend
>