"best" ed25519/curve25519 setup?

Guilhem Moulin guilhem at fripost.org
Wed Jan 24 00:10:12 CET 2018


On Tue, 23 Jan 2018 at 09:01:25 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Guilhem Moulin <guilhem at fripost.org> writes:
>> On Mon, 01 Jan 2018 at 14:28:34 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>> I want to use ed25519/curve25519, but right now I have an offline
>>> master RSA key with three subkeys.  Does it work well to add new
>>> subkeys for Ed25519/Curve25519?  What is the user experience in
>>> various applications?  I'm thinking MUAs, SSH, git, gpg itself, and
>>> also more exotic approaches like K9Mail.
>>
>> AFAICT multiple Ed25519/Curve25519 subkeys work fine, with the following
>> caveats:
>>
>> * You'll want to sign with both your Ed25519 and non-ECC (sub-)keys,
>>   otherwise non-ECC capable OpenPGP implementations won't be able to
>>   verify your data signatures.  You can do this by adding
>>
>>       local-user $FINGERPRINT!
>>   
>>   for each (sub)key to sign with (note the trailing exclamation mark
>>   to specify the subkey).
> 
> Have you noticed any problem with this approach?  I could imagine some
> software might be equally confused by two signatures, or become confused
> that GnuPG "under the hood" adds another signature.

There are non RFC-compliant implementations for sure, but FWIW RFC 4880
allows multiple signatures on the same data.  That's the last octet of
One-Pass Signature Packets, cf. RFC 4880 Sec. 5.4:

    “A one-octet number holding a flag showing whether the signature is
     nested.  A zero value indicates that the next packet is another
     One-Pass Signature packet that describes another signature to be
     applied to the same message data.”
    — https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880#section-5.4

That's often used in OpenPGP key transition statements, for instance.

That being said I didn't add a signing-capable Ed25519 subkey along with
my RSA one, and the only OpenPGP implementation I use is GnuPG, so I
don't know how well other implementations support nested signatures.
 
> I wonder if I should re-use the RSA subkeys from my current key into the
> new one...  I suppose for SSH it would be useful, but for anything
> OpenPGP-related it should be based on the master key id, right?

I see no reason to do that for signing and decryption, indeed.

-- 
Guilhem.
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