From: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 21:10:50 +0800
To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Subject: Re: open-pgp / s/mime interoperability
In-Reply-To: <91222019014234@cs26.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Message-ID: <199812031239.MAA01783@server.eternity.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




Peter Gutmann writes:
> >open-pgp public keys aren't based on X.509 keys, so I would've thought
> >s/mime implementation would barf on them.  
> 
> Actually S/MIME *could* support the use of PGP keys, but there's a field
> (the SubjectKeyIdentifier) missing from the CMS SignerInfo which prevents
> this.  

Surely this in itself should be a compelling argument for inclusion of
the SubjectKeyIdentifier?  If it allows conversion of PGP keys into
S/MIME X.509 keys.

On the subject of whether one could get a PGP key to convert into an
X.509 key such that it would function in the X.509 / S/MIME world, I'm
not sure that much can be transferred into the S/MIME world.

I think the public key parameters (actual bigints will transfer.  I am
less confident about certification transferring (third party
signatures and self signatures on public keys).  The reason I am
unsure about this is that what is signed is not codified in ASN.1 in
such a way that it would be ignored as an extension, but still hashed
by an S/MIME implementation to obtain the same hash.  Or perhaps more
that it would cause an S/MIME implementation to complain of a
corrupted certificate, even though the contents could theoretically be
hashed to get the same hash for signature verification.

Or, more specifically, how could a PGP certificate (self signed, or
signed by someone in your web of trust) be transferred into X.509 such
that the message digest of the signed information would be the same.

Where a PGP certificate includes

0       1       CTB for secret-key-encrypted (signed) packet
1       2       16-bit (or maybe 8-bit) length of packet
3       1       Version byte, may affect rest of fields that follow.
                (=2) for PGP versions <= 2.5
                (=3) for PGP versions >= 2.6
4       1       Length of following material that is implicitly included 
                in MD calculation (=5).
5       1       Signature classification field (see below). 
                Implicitly append this to message for MD calculation.
6       4       32-bit timestamp of when signature was made.  
                Implicitly append this to message for MD calculation.
10      8       64-bit Key ID
18      1       Algorithm byte for public key scheme (RSA=0x01).  
                --Algorithm byte affects field definitions that follow.
19      1       Algorithm byte for message digest (MD5=0x01).
20      2       First 2 bytes of the Message Digest inside the 
                RSA-encrypted integer, to help us figure out if we 
                used the right RSA key to check the signature.

All of these fields are non meaningful for an ASN.1 parser.

Adam