Hacker News Reader

I don't think so: neither of those tools sign the message with the same RSA keypair. sshenc.sh for example does not sign the message whatsoever. An attacker could just intercept a ciphertext, drop it, encrypt a different message and send that.

Those tools are not meant for sender authentication. If you want that you would have to first share the senders pubkey with the recipient, and sign your message with the corresponding privkey.

View on HN

While the tools themselves might not use the same key for both operations, I think the question was asking about whether it is problematic that a user’s SSH keys, used in SSH for signing, are also used by these tools for encrypting. In other words, the concern being the same key is used for two different operations, even if not in the same tool.

As I commented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953623, I’d love to see another blog post walking folks through why/how the “dangerous” RSA keys are in fact useable for both operations because the textbook RSA concerns aren’t a concern because of X, Y, and Z.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com