3:49 p.m.
Good morning slackland, yesterday I had a hangout with Matthias and we agreed that the
whole key agreement thing would bring more complexity from the developer’s pespective.
That’s the reason why the client with airline was dropped.
Here comes the new proposal: https://gist.github.com/abstractj/ef1e3d53619796f4e87e
# Passphrase encryption for UPS
**Note**: This is NOT a replacement for SSL
## Scenario
- Developers wants to upload passphrase and certificate for iOS variants. The passphrase
must be stored encrypted and restored in clear while sending messages.
## Jira references
- https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AGPUSH-565 (*Dropped*). After a hangout with Matthias,
we agreed that would complicate the developer's workflow.
- https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AGPUSH-358
## Proposal
Today we can't guarantee that our developers will have an
[HSM](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_security_module) to manage encryption keys.
Neither we can store the private keys in a separated database, for the push server.
If somehow the database is compromised, private keys could be exposed and most of the
sensitive data decrypted.
The suggestion is to make use of a *KDF function* per application to encrypt passphrases,
not perfect, but helps (like we did in the past for password reset). Where encryption key
means:
```
PK = PBKDF2(Secret Key, Salt)
```
*Secret Key*: In the ideal world, users would be required to provide a password for
encryption. In this scenario we don't want them to be prompted to input the password,
or add extra parameters to the UPS endpoints. So the suggestion is to provide secret key
configured on the server and protected by the ACL's from the operating system
*Salt*: 16 bytes non-deterministic used to encrypt/decrypt the data on the server per
application and stored into the database.
### Secret key configuration
The file can be generated and checked if something exists during the application start
up.
- config.properties
```
secret_key = "d9eb5171c59a4c817f68b0de27b8c1e340c2341b52cdbc60d3083d4e8958532"
\
"18dcc5f589cafde048faec956b61f864b9b5513ff9ce29bf9e5d58b0f234f8e3b"
```
or
- config.json
```
{"secret_key":"d9eb5171c59a4c817f68b0de27b8c1e340c2341b52cdbc60d3083d4e8958532"
\
"18dcc5f589cafde048faec956b61f864b9b5513ff9ce29bf9e5d58b0f234f8e3b"}
```
### Sending push messages
Passphrases must be reversible for Apple, that's why we make use of symmetric
encryption here.
# REST API
## Register push app
```POST | rest/applications```
### HTTP request
Remain unchanged
### HTTP response
Remain unchanged
## iOS Variant
### HTTP request
Remain unchanged
### HTTP response
Remain unchanged
## Sender
### HTTP request
Remain unchanged
### HTTP response
Remain unchanged
# Clients
No changes at the client side.
Thoughts?
--
abstractj