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On Saturday, October 20, 2012 at 17:39 PM, Vipul Sabhaya wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> I'm a developer on the RedDwarf project.  I missed the session on Trusted RPC Messaging at the summit, and we are hoping to use this when it's available.  I had some implementation/scope questions that someone may be able to answer.  
>  
> 1.  Is encryption of the message also in scope? or is the plan to only sign at this point?
The scope is to have trust between components. Signing is necessary for that, but not encryption. Encryption will be a more substantial change to the messaging format and will more heavily depend on a key management solution. My thoughts are to do signing first, encryption later.
  
> 2.  What is the solution around key management?
>  
>  


Generally, certificate management will look a lot like SSL certificate management. The pattern is well known. You generate a private key and a CSR on each host. You send the CSR to a CA for signing. You get a certificate back.  The main difference to public SSL is that you'll want to run your own CA.

Additionally, this will depend on a keyserver, like other session-less PKI systems such as PGP / GPG. The system will be pluggable so that various keyservers can be plumbed in. Some CA solutions include keyservers.

There are existing CA solutions that one can deploy, such as Dogtag, RHCA, EJBCA, SimpleCA, OpenCA, and NewPKI. This list is non-exhaustive.  There is almost as long a list of dedicated keyserver options. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Distributions can choose one, or even build one, and we can give examples. (I haven't deeply evaluated all the above options… caveat emptor)

Overall, I see this as a place for vendors to step up and provide solutions.

Regards,
Eric Windisch

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