| openpgp | D. Gillmor |
| Internet-Draft | ACLU |
| Intended status: Informational | October 29, 2019 |
| Expires: May 1, 2020 |
Stateless OpenPGP Command Line Interface
draft-dkg-openpgp-stateless-cli-01
This document defines a generic stateless command-line interface for dealing with OpenPGP messages, known as sop. It aims for a minimal, well-structured API covering OpenPGP object security.
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Different OpenPGP implementations have many different requirements, which typically break down in two main categories: key/certificate management and object security.
The purpose of this document is to provide a “stateless” interface that primarily handles the object security side of things, and assumes that secret key management and certificate management will be handled some other way.
This separation should make it easier to provide interoperability testing for the object security work, and to allow implementations to consume and produce new cryptographic primitives as needed.
This document defines a generic stateless command-line interface for dealing with OpenPGP messages, known here by the placeholder sop. It aims for a minimal, well-structured API.
An OpenPGP implementation should not name its executable sop to implement this specification, of course. It just needs to provide a binary that conforms to this interface.
A sop implementation should leave no trace on the system, and its behavior should not be affected by anything other than command-line arguments and input.
Obviously, the user will need to manage their secret keys (and their peers’ certificates) somehow, but the goal of this interface is to separate out that task from the task of interacting with OpenPGP messages.
While this document identifies a command-line interface, the rough outlines of this interface should also be amenable to relatively straightforward library implementations in different languages.
The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “NOT RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.
This document uses the term “key” to refer exclusively to OpenPGP Transferable Secret Keys (see section 11.2 of [RFC4880]).
It uses the term “certificate” to refer to OpenPGP Transferable Public Key (see section 11.1 of [RFC4880]).
“Stateless” in “Stateless OpenPGP” means avoiding secret key and certificate state. The user is responsible for managing all OpenPGP certificates and secret keys themselves, and passing them to sop as needed. The user should also not be concerned that any state could affect the underlying operations.
OpenPGP revocations can have “Reason for Revocation” (section 5.2.3.23 of [RFC4880]), which can be either “soft” or “hard”. The set of “soft” reasons is: “Key is superseded” and “Key is retired and no longer used”. All other reasons (and revocations that do not state a reason) are “hard” revocations.
These examples show no error checking, but give a flavor of how sop might be used in practice from a shell.
The key and certificate files described in them (e.g. alice.sec) could be for example those found in [I-D.draft-bre-openpgp-samples-00].
sop generate-key "Alice Lovelace <alice@openpgp.example>" > alice.sec sop extract-cert < alice.sec > alice.pgp sop sign --as=text alice.sec < announcement.txt > announcement.txt.asc sop verify announcement.txt.asc alice.pgp < announcement.txt sop encrypt --sign-with=alice.sec --as=mime bob.pgp < msg.eml > encrypted.asc sop decrypt alice.sec < ciphertext.asc > cleartext.out
sop uses a subcommand interface, similar to those popularized by systems like git and svn.
If the user supplies a subcommand that sop does not implement, it fails with a return code of 69. If a sop implementation does not handle a supplied option for a given subcommand, it fails with a return code of 37.
For all commands that have an --armor|--no-armor option, it defaults to --armor, meaning that any output OpenPGP material should be ASCII-armored (section 6 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]) by default.
sop version
The version string emitted should contain the name of the sop implementation, followed by a single space, followed by the version number.
Example:
$ sop version ExampleSop 0.2.1 $
sop generate-key [--armor|--no-armor] [--] [USERID…]
Generate a single default OpenPGP certificate with zero or more User IDs.
Example:
$ sop generate-key 'Alice Lovelace <alice@openpgp.example>' > alice.sec $ head -n1 < alice.sec -----BEGIN PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK----- $
sop extract-cert [--armor|--no-armor]
Note that the resultant CERTS object will only ever contain one OpenPGP certificate.
Example:
$ sop extract-cert < alice.sec > alice.pgp $ head -n1 < alice.pgp -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- $
sop sign [--armor|--no-armor]
[--as={binary|text}] [--] KEY [KEY...]
--as defaults to binary. If --as=text and the input DATA is not valid UTF-8, sop sign fails with a return code of 53.
Example:
$ sop sign --as=text alice.sec < message.txt > message.txt.asc $ head -n1 < message.txt.asc -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- $
sop verify [--not-before=DATE] [--not-after=DATE]
[--] SIGNATURE CERTS [CERTS...]
--not-before and --not-after indicate that signatures with dates outside certain range MUST NOT be considered valid.
--not-before defaults to the beginning of time. Accepts the special value - to indicate the beginning of time (i.e. no lower boundary).
--not-after defaults to the current system time (now). Accepts the special value - to indicate the end of time (i.e. no upper boundary).
sop verify only returns 0 if at least one certificate included in any CERTS object made a valid signature in the range over the DATA supplied.
For details about the valid signatures, the user MUST inspect the VERIFICATIONS output.
If no CERTS are supplied, sop verify fails with a return code of 19.
If no valid signatures are found, sop verify fails with a return code of 3.
See Section 9.1 for more details about signature verification.
Example:
(In this example, we see signature verification succeed first, and then fail on a modified version of the message.)
$ sop verify message.txt.asc alice.pgp < message.txt 2019-10-29T18:36:45Z EB85BB5FA33A75E15E944E63F231550C4F47E38E EB85BB5FA33A75E15E944E63F231550C4F47E38E signed by alice.pgp $ echo $? 0 $ tr a-z A-Z < message.txt | sop verify message.txt.asc alice.pgp $ echo $? 3 $
sop encrypt [--as={binary|text|mime}]
[--armor|--no-armor]
[--with-password=PASSWORD...]
[--sign-with=KEY...]
[--] [CERTS...]
--as defaults to binary.
--with-password enables symmetric encryption (and can be used multiple times if multiple passwords are desired). If sop encrypt encounters a PASSWORD which is not a valid UTF-8 string, it fails with a return code of 31. If sop encrypt sees trailing whitespace at the end of a PASSWORD, it will trim the trailing whitespace before using the password.
--sign-with enables signing by a secret key (and can be used multiple times if multiple signatures are desired).
If --as is set to either text or mime, then --sign-with will sign as a canonical text document. In this case, if the input DATA is not valid UTF-8, sop encrypt fails with a return code of 53.
The resulting CIPHERTEXT should be decryptable by the secret keys corresponding to every certificate included in all CERTS, as well as each password given with --with-password.
If no CERTS or --with-password options are present, sop encrypt fails with a return code of 19.
If at least one of the identified certificates requires encryption to an unsupported asymmetric algorithm, sop encrypt fails with a return code of 13.
If at least one of the identified certificates is not encryption-capable (e.g., revoked, expired, no encryption-capable flags on primary key and valid subkeys), sop encrypt fails with a return code of 17.
If sop encrypt fails for any reason, it emits no CIPHERTEXT.
Example:
(In this example, bob.bin is a file containing Bob’s binary-formatted OpenPGP certificate. Alice is encrypting a message to both herself and Bob.)
$ sop encrypt --as=mime --sign-with=alice.key alice.asc bob.bin < message.eml > encrypted.asc $ head -n1 encrypted.asc -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- $
sop decrypt [--session-key-out=SESSIONKEY]
[--with-session-key=SESSIONKEY...]
[--with-password=PASSWORD...]
[--verify-out=VERIFICATIONS
[--verify-with=CERTS...]
[--verify-not-before=DATE]
[--verify-not-after=DATE] ]
[--] [KEY...]
--session-key-out can be used to learn the session key on successful decryption.
If sop decrypt fails for any reason and the identified --session-key-out file already exists in the filesystem, the file will be unlinked.
--with-session-key enables decryption of the CIPHERTEXT using the session key directly against the SEIPD packet. This option can be used multiple times if several possible session keys should be tried.
--with-password enables decryption based on any SKESK packets in the CIPHERTEXT. This option can be used multiple times if the user wants to try more than one password.
If sop decrypt tries and fails to use a supplied PASSWORD, and it observes that there is trailing UTF-8 whitespace at the end of the PASSWORD, it will retry with the trailing whitespace stripped.
--verify-out produces signature verification status to the designated file.
sop decrypt does not fail (that is, the return code is not modified) based on the results of signature verification. The caller MUST check the returned VERIFICATIONS to confirm signature status. An empty VERIFICATIONS output indicates that no valid signatures were found. If sop decrypt itself fails for any reason, and the identified VERIFICATIONS file already exists in the filesystem, the file will be unlinked.
--verify-with identifies a set of certificates whose signatures would be acceptable for signatures over this message.
If the caller is interested in signature verification, both --verify-out and at least one --verify-with must be supplied. If only one of these arguments is supplied, sop decrypt fails with a return code of 23.
--verify-not-before and --verify-not-after provide a date range for acceptable signatures, by analogy with the options for sop verify (see Section 3.5). They should only be supplied when doing signature verification.
See Section 9.1 for more details about signature verification.
If no KEY or --with-password or --with-session-key options are present, sop decrypt fails with a return code of 19.
If unable to decrypt, sop decrypt fails with a return code of 29.
sop decrypt only returns cleartext to Standard Output that was successfully decrypted.
Example:
(In this example, Alice stashes and re-uses the session key of an encrypted message.)
$ sop decrypt --session-key-out=session.key alice.sec < ciphertext.asc > cleartext.out $ ls -l ciphertext.asc cleartext.out -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 321 Oct 28 01:34 ciphertext.asc -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 285 Oct 28 01:34 cleartext.out $ sop decrypt --with-session-key=session.key < ciphertext.asc > cleartext2.out $ diff cleartext.out cleartext2.out $
sop armor [--label={auto|sig|key|cert|message}]
[--allow-nested]
The user can choose to specify the label used in the header and tail of the armoring. The default is auto, in which case, sop inspects the input and chooses the label appropriately. In this case, if sop cannot select a label on the basis of the input, it treats it as literal data, and labels it as a message.
If the incoming data is already armored, and the --allow-nested flag is not specified, the data MUST be output with no modifications. Data is considered ASCII armored iff the first 14 bytes are exactly -----BEGIN PGP. This operation is thus idempotent by default.
Example:
$ sop armor < bob.bin > bob.pgp $ head -n1 bob.pgp -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- $
sop dearmor
Example:
$ sop dearmor < message.txt.asc > message.txt.sig $
Some material is passed to sop directly as a string on the command line.
An ISO-8601 formatted timestamp with time zone, or the special value now to indicate the current system time.
Examples:
now 2019-10-29T12:11:04+00:00 2019-10-24T23:48:29Z 20191029T121104Z
In some cases where used to specify lower and upper boundaries, a DATE value can be set to - to indicate “no time limit”.
A flexible implementation of sop MAY accept date inputs in other unambiguous forms.
This is an arbitrary UTF-8 string. By convention, most User IDs are of the form Display Name <email.address@example.com>, but they do not need to be.
Some material is passed to sop indirectly, typically by referring to a filename containing the data in question. This type of data may also be passed to sop on Standard Input, or delivered by sop to Standard Output.
If the filename for any indirect material used as input has the special form @ENV:xxx, then contents of environment variable $xxx is used instead of looking in the filesystem.
If the filename for any indirect material used as either input or output has the special form @FD:nnn where nnn is a decimal integer, then the associated data is read from file descriptor nnn.
If any input data does not meet the requirements described below, sop will fail with a return code of 41.
One or more OpenPGP certificates (section 11.1 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]), aka “Transferable Public Key”. May be armored.
Although some existing workflows may prefer to use one CERTS object with multiple certificates in it (a “keyring”), supplying exactly one certificate per CERTS input will make error reporting clearer and easier.
Exactly one OpenPGP Transferable Secret Key (section 11.2 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]). May be armored.
Secret key material should be in cleartext (that is, it should not be locked with a password). If the secret key maerial is locked with a password, sop may fail to use the key.
sop accepts only a restricted subset of the arbitrarily-nested grammar allowed by the OpenPGP Messages definition (section 11.3 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]).
In particular, it accepts and generates only:
An OpenPGP message, consisting of a sequence of PKESKs (section 5.1 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]) and SKESKs (section 5.3 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]), followed by one SEIPD (section 5.14 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]).
The SEIPD can decrypt into one of two things:
“Maybe Signed Data” is a sequence of:
FIXME: does any tool do compression inside signing? Do we need to handle that?
May be armored.
One or more OpenPGP Signature packets. May be armored.
This documentation uses the GnuPG defacto ASCII representation:
ALGONUM:HEXKEY
where ALGONUM is the decimal value associated with the OpenPGP Symmetric Key Algorithms (section 9.3 of [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis]).
Example AES-256 session key:
9:FCA4BEAF687F48059CACC14FB019125CD57392BAB7037C707835925CBF9F7BCD
This is expected to be a UTF-8 string, but for sop decrypt, any bytestring that the user supplies will be accepted. Note the details in sop encrypt and sop decrypt about trailing whitespace!
One line per successful signature verification. Each line has three structured fields delimited by a single space, followed by arbitrary text to the end of the line.
Example:
2019-10-24T23:48:29Z C90E6D36200A1B922A1509E77618196529AE5FF8 C4BC2DDB38CCE96485EBE9C2F20691179038E5C6 certificate from dkg.asc
Cleartext, arbitrary data. This is either a bytestream or UTF-8 text.
It MUST only be UTF-8 text in the case of input supplied to sop sign --as=text or sop encrypt --as={mime|text}. If sop receives DATA containing non-UTF-8 octets in this case, it will fail with return code 53.
When sop succeeds, it will return 0 and emit nothing to Standard Error. When sop fails, it fails with a non-zero return code, and emits one or more warning messages on Standard Error. Known return codes include:
| Return | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 0 | Success |
| 3 | No acceptable signatures found (sop verify) |
| 13 | Asymmetric algorithm unsupported (sop encrypt) |
| 17 | Certificate not encryption-capable (e.g., expired, revoked, unacceptable usage flags) (sop encrypt) |
| 19 | Missing required argument |
| 23 | Incomplete verification instructions (sop decrypt) |
| 29 | Unable to decrypt (sop decrypt) |
| 31 | Non-UTF-8 password (sop encrypt) |
| 37 | Unsupported option |
| 41 | Invalid data type (no secret key where KEY expected, etc) |
| 53 | Non-text input where text expected |
| 69 | Unsupported subcommand |
A sop implementation MAY return other error codes than those listed above.
sop uses a few assumptions that implementers might want to consider.
sop is intended to be a simple tool that operates on one OpenPGP object at a time. It should be composable, if you want to use it to deal with multiple OpenPGP objects
FIXME: discuss what this means for streaming. The stdio interface doesn’t necessarily imply streamed output.
While the formal grammar for OpenPGP Message is arbitrarily nestable,sop constrains itself to what it sees as a single “layer” (see Section 5.3).
This is a deliberate choice, because it is what most consumers expect, and runaway recursion is bad news.
Note that an implementation of sop decrypt MAY choose to handle more complex structures, but if it does, it should document the other structures it handles and why it chooses to do so. We can use such documentation to improve future versions of this spec.
There are generally only a few signers who are relevant for a given OpenPGP message. When verifying signatures, sop expects that the caller can identify those relevant signers ahead of time.
sop deals with detached signatures as the baseline form of OpenPGP signatures.
The main problem this avoids is the trickiness of handling a signature that is mixed inline into the data that it is signing.
A truly stateless implementation may find that it spends more time validating the internal consistency of certificates and keys than it does on the actual object security operations.
For performance reasons, an implementation may choose to ignore validation on certificate and key material supplied to it. The security implications are of doing so depend on how the certs and keys are managed outside of sop.
While sop is originally conceived of as an interface for interoperability testing, it’s conceivable that an application that uses OpenPGP for object security would want to use it.
FIXME: more guidance for how to use such a tool safely and efficiently goes here.
FIXME: if an encrypted OpenPGP message arrives without metadata, it is difficult to know which signers to consider when decrypting. How do we do this efficiently without invoking sop decrypt twice, once without --verify-* and again with the expected identity material?
The OpenPGP object security model is typically used for confidentiality and authenticity purposes.
In many contexts, an OpenPGP signature is verified, to prove the origin and integrity of an underlying object.
When sop checks a signature (e.g. via sop verify or sop decrypt --verify-with, it MUST NOT consider it to be verified unless all of these conditions are met:
Implementers MAY also consider other factors in addition to the origin and authenticity, including application-specific information.
For example, consider the application domain of checking software updates.
If software package Foo version 13.3.2 was signed on 2019-10-04, and the user receives a copy of Foo version 12.4.8 that was signed on 2019-10-16, it may be authentic and have a more recent signature date. But it is not an upgrade (12.4.8 < 13.3.2), and therefore it should not be applied automatically.
In such cases, it is critical that the application confirms that the other information verified is also protected by the relevant OpenPGP signature.
Signature validity is a complex topic, and this documentation cannot list all possible details.
The interface as currently specified does not allow for control of compression. Compressing and encrypting data that may contain both attacker-supplied material and sensitive material could leak information about the sensitive material (see the CRIME attack).
Unless an application knows for sure that no attacker-supplied material is present on the input, it should not compress during encryption.
Material produced by sop encrypt may be placed on an untrusted machine (e.g., sent through the public SMTP network). That material may contain metadata that leaks associational information (e.g., recipient identifiers in PKESK packets). FIXME: document things like PURBs and --hidden-recipient)
OpenPGP offers an object security model, but says little to nothing about how the secured objects get to the relevant parties.
When sending or receiving OpenPGP material, the implementer should consider what privacy leakage is implicit with the transport.
[ RFC Editor: please remove this section before publication ]
This document is currently edited as markdown. Minor editorial changes can be suggested via merge requests at https://gitlab.com/dkg/openpgp-stateless-cli or by e-mail to the authors. Please direct all significant commentary to the public IETF OpenPGP mailing list: openpgp@ietf.org
substantive changes between -00 and -01:
This work was inspired by Justus Winter’s [OpenPGP-Interoperability-Test-Suite].
The following people contributed helpful feedback and considerations to this draft, but are not responsible for its problems:
| [I-D.ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis] | Koch, W., carlson, b., Tse, R., Atkins, D. and D. Gillmor, "OpenPGP Message Format", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-openpgp-rfc4880bis-08, September 2019. |
| [RFC2119] | Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997. |
| [RFC4880] | Callas, J., Donnerhacke, L., Finney, H., Shaw, D. and R. Thayer, "OpenPGP Message Format", RFC 4880, DOI 10.17487/RFC4880, November 2007. |
| [RFC8174] | Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017. |
| [I-D.draft-bre-openpgp-samples-00] | Einarsson, B., juga, j. and D. Gillmor, "OpenPGP Example Keys and Certificates", Internet-Draft draft-bre-openpgp-samples-00, October 2019. |
| [OpenPGP-Interoperability-Test-Suite] | "OpenPGP Interoperability Test Suite", October 2019. |