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Comment by raphinou | Hacker News Reader

I am working on an open source project where users provide signatures of their projects artifacts (this is oversimplified for the sake of the discussion).

Started using Minisign as the signature scheme. But we're struggling to find a clean solution for users keys renewal, revocation and updated public key distribution. I thought foks might help for that but the examples don't seem to confirm this. Basically the question I need to answer is :how can users trusting an existing signing key also trust the new key replacing it? I hoped we might outsource this to foks, but I think I misunderstood foks in the first place.

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This would be a great application for us! We are not exactly there yet, for reasons of privacy. Right now, there is no way for alice@host to allow unauthenticated users to view her profile. But we can definitely allow this on a host-by-host basis. With this small change, I think your application fits very naturally.

I wonder, what sort of interface is right for you? A library to compile against or a CLI app to shell out to? If a library, which languages?

Interesting! We're at a very early stage of the implementation and develop in rust. We aim to provide multi-sig capabilities, as defined in a JSON file where the public keys of the signers can be found. If a signer looses a key, we want this 'signers' file to be updatable with the new key. We decided that signers can be humans of processes, so the keys are not an identity of a person, which might be an important detail. Currently, to update a signers file, other members of the multi-sig must sign the update. This works fine, but we are early enough in the project implementation to explore other approaches, hence my question.

We'd rather not shell out to a cli, and would preferably go with a lib or rest interface.

An attack that might be of concern with this configuration is the server suppressing updates to this JSON file, or showing different versions of the JSON file to different clients. What you're describing is pretty close to what FOKS is getting at with signature chains and Merkle Trees, but maybe it's overkill for this particular application.

I wonder if the policy you describe could be implemented as world-visible team with world-visible users. Others have commented on the need for something like this, so I think it should be pursued with high priority. What's slighlty fuzzy to me is how these totally world-viewable teams and users would interact with more closed-down users on other servers.

Although I didn't consider this attack possibility (thanks for raising it!), I think we are reasonably immune to it or able to detect it with the way we manipulate and store the JSON (though completely avoiding it seems not attainable, at one point the client has to trust the response it gets from a server, am I right? Otherwise I'm very interested in pointers to learn more!)

World visible teams and users might be a way to define our multi-sigs members. But we would still need a JSON file for others characteristics of the multi-sig. I'll keep an eye on foks as if it becomes a good fit, it might let us concentrate on our service and not on key management intricacies. My email is on my HN profile, in case you want to notify me of advancement fitting our use case.

Try looking into SSI (self-sovereign identity) and verifiable credentials - the use-case you are referring to.

Thanks for the pointers. Are first glance, SSI seem to be mainly Blockchain based, which we diverted from to be able to have easy on premise deployments. Verifiable credentials look interesting, but need to check usability. We want our solution to be very easy to use.

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