Re: [Monotone-devel] WARNING: ~/.monotone/keys CONSIDERED HARMFUL

[Daniel Carrera]

Robert White wrote:
> Claiming it as a security action is a red herring. The key files are
> encrypted anyway and physical access to the database is just as
> likely-or-unlikely as physical access to the keydir.

Other security products consider it very bad practice to distribute 
private keys, even when encrypted. For example, encrypted private keys 
in an attacker's hard disk are easily susceptible to dictionary attacks.

I think that Ethan's idea has a lot of merit. Btw, PGP allows a user to 
have multiple keys associated with the same name and email. To help the 
user distinguish between keys. If you list them, they look like this:

Daniel Carrera (Personal) <address@hidden>
Daniel Carrera (Foo Corp) <address@hidden>
Daniel Carrera (Bar Inc) <address@hidden>
etc


Perhaps something similar would be suitable for Monotone.


I also have an idea to help Monotone migrate from its current system to 
a PGP-like system: Internally Monotone would have to use the key 
fingerprint, there's no getting around that. But when the user has to 
submit a key id, allow the user to provide an email or first name 
instead, as long as it is unambiguous. That's what GnuPG does. I can 
just say "Daniel" on the command line because I only have one key that 
matches that string.


> At the least we should have, on a database-instance by database-instance,
> the choice of whether we want this common pollution area known a keydir.

I note that GnuPG puts keys in a common directory, and in fact, a common 
file. If Monotone switched to using the key fingerprint as the file 
name, that would avoid collisions. So I do not think that keydir is the 
problem. I also believe that storing the private key in the DB would 
have bad consequences (security and collisions).

Daniel.