[zeromq-dev] Is there a reasonable way to use an existing PKI and D/TLS with 0MQ?

[John Lane Schultz]

I’m new to 0MQ, so please excuse my ignorance about it.  I read the guide book, the blog entries on CurveZMQ, looked at the directory of 0MQ GitHub repositories, and googled around to see if anyone had added a D/TLS layer into 0MQ. I didn’t find much of anything.

I did find the email below from 4 years ago, that seems to answer a similar question from back then.  Is it still the situation that 0MQ doesn’t readily support using D/TLS to secure its communications?

I ask because we have an existing PKI managing more than 2000 distributed identities and we use D/TLS to secure our mutually authenticated (the “Ironhouse Pattern") point-to-point communications.  If it matters, we use Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchanges with long term RSA keys.

From my reading, 0MQ looks really appealing to get away from low-level programming OpenSSL D/TLS, UDP, and TCP sockets, but not being able to use our existing security infrastructure would probably be a deal breaker.

I’d greatly appreciate any information on the current state of affairs of 0MQ security layers and whether or not adding D/TLS support to 0MQ is reasonable or not.

Thanks!
John

From ph at imatix.com  Fri Oct  4 00:46:06 2013
From: ph at imatix.com (Pieter Hintjens)
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 00:46:06 +0200
Subject: [zeromq-dev] Using other kinds of certificates with CurveZMQ
In-Reply-To: <F321E1DDD74B4747BE218256F9B069F313064041 at GQ1-EX10-MB05.y.corp.yahoo.com>
References: <F321E1DDD74B4747BE218256F9B069F313064041 at GQ1-EX10-MB05.y.corp.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <CADL5_shGNyOg8=NBsQW7eOBnu4qsKD_1pVWXp4PJda3MJePtpg at mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 12:34 AM, Steve Carney <carney at yahoo-inc.com> wrote:

> I have an infrastructure with existing certificates that is not ready to
> move to CurveCP yet.    Does CurveZMQ have an underlying framework (due
> using SASL) that I could use to implement SSL authentication (with and
> without encryption)?

No, CurveZMQ has its own properties. I've described this superficially
here: http://hintjens.com/blog:48

> I also have simple proprietary certificates that I?d like to support as part
> of establishing a client-server connection.  A simple cleartext key exchange
> would be sufficient.  Could CurveZMQ be leveraged for this as well?

Not directly... The keys that CurveZMQ uses are specific to the
elliptic curve cryptography used.  However you could use your existing
certificates and some (non-ZeroMQ) transport to exchange CurveZMQ
certificates.

-Pieter