TOFU Design

[Werner Koch]

On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 14:24, neal at walfield.org said:

> Finally, we'd have to regularize names.  At least for latin and
> germanic languages, UTF-8 canonicalization, space compression and down
> casing should be enough.  But, I'm not sure about other languages
> where letters are combined.

Just to clarify: GnuPG only knows about UTF-8 (as per OpenPGP) and it
does not handle IDNA etc.  Any mapping to the encoding required for
example by rfc822 has to be done outside of GnuPG.

> Note: it is unclear what to do when the OpenPGP User ID is not in RFC
> 2822 form or there is no email address.

I suggest to ignore such a user id.
See gnupg/common/mbox-util.c:mailbox_from_userid on GnuPG parses userids.


> Verification
> ============


>   - If no bindings contain either the email address or the key, then
>     we ask the user whether to accept the new binding.

For TOFU alone this would be okay but TOFU is only one part of the
story.  We need to limit user interaction to the bare minimum.  Thus in
this case we need to lookup the key using DNS (PKA style CERT records)
by th mail address.  The binding should have a "Initial-Source" field to
record that the binding has been created from

  a) PKA
  b) keyserver lookup by fingerprint
  c) a key send with a message
  d) the verification of a signed message
  e) a manually imported key with verified fingerprint (keysigning).

This information can be useful in cae of a conflict.  For example a
manually imported key should be more trustworthy than one take from a
keyserver.  The exact rules need to be worked out but tracking the
source needs to be there right from the beginning.

> course, for new bindings, the key is probably not yet available and if
> the user hasn't enabled auto-key-locate (which is disabled by
> default), then we can't do the verification nor can we update the

We need to change some of the defaults - at least for email use.
Traffic patterns are anyway not protected and thus it does not sense to
avoid network access by default.  For those who need it they can use
--disable-dirmngr to avoid all kind of network access or use the
proposed --enable-tor option.  The goal is to increase the use of
encrypted mail and not to be safe against targeted attacks by default.

> Export
> ======
>
> Should TOFU bindings be exportable?  TOFU reveals the user's social

No.  That should be kept local like the trustdb.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.