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FiloSottilelast Monday at 6:14 PM4 repliesview on HN

How do you do revocation or software updates securely if your current signature algorithm is compromised?


Replies

ekr____last Monday at 6:24 PM

As a practical matter, revocation on the Web is handled mostly by centrally distributed revocation lists (CRLsets, CRLite, etc. [0]), so all you really need is:

(1) A PQ-secure way of getting the CRLs to the browser vendors. (2) a PQ-secure update channel.

Neither of these require broad scale deployment.

However, the more serious problem is that if you have a setting where most servers do not have PQ certificates, then disabling the non-PQ certificates means that lots of servers can't do secure connections at all. This obviously causes a lot of breakage and, depending on the actual vulnerability of the non-PQ algorithms, might not be good for security either, especially if people fall back to insecure HTTP.

See: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/pq-emergency/ and https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/post-quantum...

[0] The situation is worse for Apple.

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johnisgoodyesterday at 7:10 AM

I do not understand the fixation on authentication/signatures. They have different threat characteristics:

You cannot retroactively forge historical authentication sessions, and future forgery ability does not compromise past data, and it only matters for long-lived signed artifacts (certificates, legal documents, etc.), yet the thread apparently keeps pivoting to signature deployment complexity?

I do not get it.

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xorcistyesterday at 1:40 PM

The actual revocation needn't be secure. False revocations are an oxymoron.

The practice around revocations need to be secure of course, but that's more on an engineering problem than a cryptographical.

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GoblinSlayeryesterday at 11:00 AM

Use PSK signature.