[aerogear-dev] Passphrase encryption - REST API discussion

[Bruno Oliveira]

Good morning slackers, moving forward with my attempt to put pants on passphrases. I would like to discuss how the REST API would be with the change, because is better to have feedback instead of work for days and waste some time.

Register push app:

- HTTP request

  Remain unchanged

- HTTP response

{"id":"2095ab1a-a569-4ae2-a43c-a86b83041592”,
"name":"MyApp”,
"description":"awesome app”,
"pushApplicationID":"ca99487d-6387-41bd-b393-0ce480977efe”,
"masterSecret":"b315d524-e9f9-4d04-946c-b73278ff29be”,
"developer":"admin”,
"androidVariants":[],
"simplePushVariants":[],
“chromePackagedAppVariants":[],
"publicKey":"MFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcDQgAEpsPA31qRWrtiAhnpGBzgwoE435c18gD42y13urb0JSdx4AHQRthhAUFVnu+RqUU8NTp9tGnEEhyBZfbV67arVw==“,
“nonce”:”6KbYGZKvTusU+IL3sdY9g=="
"iosvariants":[]}


publicKey: Is the public key created per application and will be optional for developers who do care about security. If for some reason they don’t want to encrypt their passphrase or certificate, that’s ok.

nonce: 16 bytes non-deterministic used to encrypt the data on the server

Note: Both would be stored into UPS database (not perfect, but a good start)

Keep in mind that this is just the initial idea, for example, masterSecret should never return in clear. To the further interactions it will be fixed establishing a key agreement between client and server and encrypt the whole response (only for sensitive data). Yeah, I know, we are protected by SSL, but we shouldn’t trust on it.


iOS Variant:

- HTTP request

  Remain unchanged, but now certificate and passphrase can be send encrypted and the server will store it.		

- HTTP response

  Remain unchaged

Sender:

- HTTP request

  Remain unchanged, but now the server will search for the application ID and retrieve the public key to decrypt application's passphrase

- HTTP response

  Remain unchanged


AeroGear Clients

- cURL

Yesterday I had the amusing experience of dig into the sources of OpenSSL and their documentation, to see how people could encrypt it from the command line. If I recommend that people would remember my name for the eternity in a bad way. Another insane idea was to provide encoders for GPG. The simplest idea, I think, would be provide code for people encrypt their passphrase and certificate, instead of trust in some software.

- aerogear-unifiedpush-java-client

No problem to implement it.

- aerogear-simplepush-java-client

No problem to implement it.

- aerogear-simplepush-node-client

Not so easy, but they do OpenSSL behind the scenes

- aerogear-unifiedpush-nodejs-client

Not so easy, but they do OpenSSL behind the scenes


So, what do you think? Yay/Nay? I would never use that?

The goal is to provide secure alternatives to developers, but if the whole process will turn into a pain, I won’t move forward.



 

--  
abstractj