[zeromq-dev] Curve question... changing keys after binding server socket...

[Keith Henrickson]

Sorry, I was writing that and trying to get out of the office. Never a great combination.

First, I think regularly rotating the long-term keys is dangerous for exactly the reasons you describe. However, when someone has a info sec policy that says, “All keys must be rotated every x months.”, there’s a limit to how much you can tell them, “This isn’t the solution you’re looking for.”

Second, and this took me a while to understand, which shames me… Although the options are re-read on each connection, they’re stored on the own_t root object. Although passed in by reference, they’re stored as a regular member, and thus, a copy is created when an own_t derived type is instantiated. The connections therefore use the keys that are current at the time a tcp_listener_t is created. Once that’s created (looks like it’s done around the bind() time), it’s set in stone. Can we count on that behavior remaining the same in the future?


On May 20, 2014, at 12:36 AM, Pieter Hintjens <ph at imatix.com> wrote:

> First, long term keys are not meant to change, that's the whole point.
> Distributing new keys is a complex and risky part of the process so
> the only time you'd want to generate new long term keys is if the
> server private key was compromised.
> 
> Second, yes, it does (afaik) re-read the long term key before each
> connection so you could change the LT key randomly. There's no sane
> use case for this that I can see.
> 
> Third, once a connection is established the LT keys aren't used again.
> This is inherent in the CurveZMQ design. You could and would normally
> force all connections to end, by restarting the server.
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 2:44 AM, Keith Henrickson
> <keith.henrickson at nominum.com> wrote:
>> Presently once the server socket is bound, the keys can never change, as they’re not read from the socket options again.
>> 
>> Not a bad idea, but I’m wondering if that would ever change? Would the server-side ever be changed to read the keys from the options upon each connection?
>> 
>> If the server keys were allowed to change, what would happen to connections in progress? It looks to me like the long-term keys are not involved in the per-message crypto, so my guess would be that changing the server’s long-term secret would have no effect on connections that have already negotiated?
>> 
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