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It verifies a different thing. It doesn't verify that a specific
person signed it, just that a trusted person signed it. If there are
only two people in the circuit, then I know that the other person must
have signed it if I didn't. You also have to remember that you can't
verify this signature either if you don't have access to the secret key.
Greg Rubin
John Lightfoot wrote:
I don't understand how a signature can work with a shared key. If
two people share a key, how can you tell which one of them signed
it?
-----Original Message----- From: Gregory Rubin
[mailto:grrubin@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 12:55 PM
To: Craig Wright Cc: gillettdavid@fhda.edu; shyaam@gmail.com;
security-basics@securityfocus.com Subject: Re: Signing before
Encryption and Signing after Encryption
True. Signatures don't really require asymmetric keys. An example
of this is an HMAC and variants thereof. Right now, I'm commonly
signing URLs using the following system (so I have no excuse for
forgetting it):
BaseUrl = http://www.foo.com/one/two?three=four Secret =
SharedSecret Signature = md5(Secret + BaseURL)
New URL = BaseURL + "&hash=" + Signature
Greg Rubin
On 3/21/06, Craig Wright <cwright@bdosyd.com.au> wrote:
Hello, Just to be difficult....
David stated "Signing requires a private key". This is correct
through feasibility, but it is not technically correct as there
are signature schemes that only require symmetric keys. Signing
with symmetric keys is a lot more complex and thus more prone to
error and has a range of key management issues. This does not
mean that it is not possible.
In fact there are scheme to sign a message using only Hashing
algorithms. The simplest of these is to hash the document and
keep a list of document hashes (similar to software). A user
could check the list to see if the message was valid or if
tampering had occurred. A third party could keep the hash tables
to ensure that the lists where accurate.
So signing does not require a private key - it just makes it
easier. Next it also depends on non-repudiation/repudiation
issues. It is easy to sign a document and have a verification
that it is unaltered but with no proof that the original signer
could not come back and accuse the receiver of forging the
document.
An example symmetric scheme could be:
Alice encrypts a message using a symmetric key known to Bob (and
Alice only) Alice hashes the encrypted message Alice encrypts the
(encrypted) message and hash using a symmetric key known to Jim
but unknown to Bob Bob receives the hashed and encrypted message.
If Bob alters the message - the hash will not work. Alice can not
lie as Jim has a copy. Key management is a bugger, but still
possible (though unlikely)
ANSI X9.17 Notarised Symmetric Keys may be used to sign.
Regards Craig S Wright
PS There are also hybrid ciphers for signing which are based on a
combination of all the above - but this for another post
-----Original Message----- From: David Gillett
[mailto:gillettdavid@fhda.edu] Sent: 22 March 2006 6:21 To:
shyaam@gmail.com; security-basics@securityfocus.com Subject: RE:
Signing before Encryption and Signing after Encryption
Signing requires a private key -- therefore, it *must* be
Asymmetric. Asymmetric is typically much slower than Symmetric,
so you get things like SSL that use Asymmetric to protect the
exchange of the Symmetric key used for actual payload encryption.
Signing after encryption allows the signature to be verified
before/without decrypting the payload. There are a variety of
circumstances in which that could be useful, which are blocked if
the signing is done first. I can't think of any where the
opposite is true.
David Gillett, CISSP
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