By Justus | September 7, 2018
Hey folks :)
I’d like to inform you about the recent progress on your favorite OpenPGP implementation. It has been five weeks since my last report, and there are exciting developments to report.
Our parser is now more robust. If a packet stream is damaged, it tries to find the next OpenPGP frame, and resumes parsing. This helps to deal with corrupted data returned from key servers.
Sequoia now features an API to generate keys and construct a TPK structure. This is a medium-level API that takes care of creating the binding signatures.
ASCII Armor, designed to protect OpenPGP data in transit, has been a source of problems if the armor structure is damaged. For example, copying data manually from one program to another might introduce or drop newlines. Our armor parser now simply tries to detect base64-encoded OpenPGP data. This way, if the framing is in any way damaged, or even stripped, we can still recover the message.
Our detached signature verification tool, sqv, now supports –not-before and –not-after options that constrain the signatures that are considered valid to the given interval. Furthermore, it properly ignores duplicate signatures, and multiple signatures from the same TPK.
Sequoia can now generate and parse the proposed intended recipient subpacket. Support for emitting the subpacket is implemented in the streaming signer. Since Sequoia currently lacks a streaming decryption and verification interface, the counterpart of checking the intended recipients is not yet implemented.
We have been working on the usability of our command line frontends. It is no longer necessary to use -i to specify the input file. We now generate shell completions for both sq and sqv for all shells supported by our command line parser (bash, fish, zsh, PowerShell, and elvish). sq gained support for signature generation and verification. Keys for all cryptographic operations can now be given as files. sq dump now pretty-prints the packets, similar to pgpdump.
We now generate a pkgconfig file for the debug build. Linking against Sequoia from C during development is now as easy as pointing PKG_CONFIG_PATH to sequoia/target/debug.
Sequoia is now more efficient in terms of stack use when parsing multiple signatures, and nested signatures (i.e. notarizations) can now be checked.
Sequoia gained a streaming signature verification filter. Streaming verification (and decryption) has been missing until now, because designing an API that is convenient yet reasonably safe has been challenging, and the verifying filter is our testbed for the more complex case of a decrypting and verifying filter.
We cleaned up our interface, and did some refactoring to get rid of accumulated technical debt. Notably our packet structs are now opaque and have appropriate accessors, and the structure of the openpgp crate is cleaner and hopefully a bit more accessible.
Our TPK module can now merge incomplete TPKs. Such TPKs may be handed out by a privacy-preserving keyserver that omits UserIDs when clients poll for key updates.
Kai published his ongoing work on our keyserver. The keyserver aims at being more performant, and more privacy preserving than the SKS keyserver network. It can be found here: https://gitlab.com/sequoia-pgp/garbage-pile
Neal cut the recordings of our talks at the Delta X gathering, and they can be found on our web site.
Finally, this is the first of these reports that is also published in our blog in the hope that this is more accessible for the casual reader.
That’s it for now, thanks for flying with Sequoia :)
