Managing Code Signing Digital IDs for Open Source? 103
Saqib Ali asks: "What are the best practices for managing Code Signing Digital IDs for Open Source projects, where the developers are dispersed throughout the globe? For our project there is NO central office, where we can secure the private key for the Code Signing Digital ID. Who should have the possession of the private key? Multiple people, or just the project manager? What Key Escrow (recovery) techniques can be used, in case the private key holder is not available? Who should be allowed to digitally sign the build? Currently one person handles the signing responsibility, but I think that is surely a single point of failure. Any thoughts/ideas?"
RM (Score:2, Informative)
Shamir Secret Share (Score:3, Informative)
Secret Sharing and Verifiable Secret Sharing (Score:5, Informative)
My research is currently looking into approaches to related areas (as a user, not necessarily as a cryptographer), you may wish to look into "secret sharing", where given a secret (e.g. a private key), a set of participants, and what the literature calls an access structure which is a collection of subsets of participants that you wish to be able to easily recover the secret (called a qualified subset), establishes a two stage protocol:
There are proactive variants that periodically recut the shares to prevent accumulated leaking of shares over time from forming a qualified subset.
Also there are verified secret sharing schemes which support a verify operation, where a share can be checked for correctness without trying to reconstruct the secret (so that bad dealers can be caught and that at reconstruct time invalid shares can be found prior to reconstruction).
Finally there are "cheating immune" schemes. A cheater is a participant who gives a bogus share at reconstruct time. If they know something about the reconstruction step and can assume the other participants are giving valid shares, some schemes may allow the cheaters to learn something about the secret. In cheating immune schemes, this is prevented.
Finally there are schemes that use verifiable threshold schemes and verifiable secret sharing for digital signatures.
If you are interested in some references, Doug Stinson's bibliography on Secret Sharing [uwaterloo.ca] (he has some recent work too). Tal Rabin has done some good work, as has Markus Stadler. Recent work by Stanislaw Jarecki [uci.edu] has caught my eye.
Keep a printout... (Score:2, Informative)
Found it! (Score:3, Informative)
Distributed hardware threshold signature. (Score:3, Informative)
So to sign, requires cooperation of k1 developers, and 1 smart card.
Re:Found it! (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe submit it to Unmaintained Free Software?
http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/ [unmaintain...ftware.org]