[RFC 1/2] Add support for openssl engine based keys

[Douglas E Engert]

James,
Another way to look at PKCS#11 and tokens it so consider
the token as consisting of the TPM itself and a set of flat engine
files associated with it. The PKCS#11 module internally would then load
as needed a flat engine file to the TPM for a one time use.
So to the PKCS#11 caller it looks like any other PKCS#11 token. This would
also be useful for applications other then OpenSSH.

This approach then does not need to modify OpenSSL either, as the code
is contained in the PKCS#11 module and OpenSSL can use PKCS#11 via
the OpenSC libp11 with its engine.

A place to start might be the softHSM or other software based PKCS#11 module,
then add support for the TPM to load one key and use it.
Googling for TPM PKCS#11 shows others have developed PKCS#11 and TPM
modules but maybe not for TPM 2.0 with its limited memory.


On 11/3/2017 12:59 AM, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Fri, 2017-11-03 at 13:11 +1100, Damien Miller wrote:
>> On Thu, 26 Oct 2017, James Bottomley wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Engine keys are keys whose file format is understood by a specific
>>> engine rather than by openssl itself.  Since these keys are file
>>> based, the pkcs11 interface isn't appropriate for them because they
>>> don't actually represent tokens.
>>
>> What sort of keys do you have in mind here that can't be represented
>> via PKCS#11?
> 
> Well, the engine keys are flat files, so the usual use case is to take
> the private key file and replace it with an engine key file in the .ssh
> directory so the private key becomes tied to the hardware platform and
> cannot be usefully exfiltrated.
> 
> PKCS11 is used to represent tokens, so with TPM 1.2 you could load up
> the TPM with keys and then address them via the uuid as an effective
> PKCS11 token instead of using key files.  With TPM 2.0 you can't do
> this because the transient key space is so tiny, so you have to use key
> files which are loaded as needed.  It would be possible to write some
> glue daemon to take all the keys in the .ssh directory and export them
> via PKCS11 (that's what gnome-keyring-daemon does, after all) but it's
> adding an additional layer that doesn't need to be there, so the
> natural format for TPM 2.0 is an engine key file.
> 
> James
> 
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-- 

  Douglas E. Engert  <DEEngert at gmail.com>