kmip-interop-tech — archive

[John Leiseboer]

On 6/09/2012 5:01 AM, Bruce Rich wrote: Yeah, what he said. And I would note that "immutable" does not appear in the spec, so asserting that it's an essential property of KMIP Managed Objects is difficult to agree to.  I agree that Managed Cryptographic Objects do not currently have mutators (if one asserts that Attributes are not part of the objects).  I believe that's merely an observation, not a specification of anything. Tim> Ahh ... you missed out on many a debate around exactly this topic back when AlanF was working through how to add Users to the system and how you could go about doing things like changing the password of a User. That made everything attributes in the model as an Object is immutable currently as we have explicitly defined no operations that would support updating the value or included any concept anywhere in the specification that would even hint that such a concept is meant to be possible. The use cases for streaming key material (and possibly asynchronously delivered keys – symmetric, asymmetric, and one-time pad “fragments”) may introduce mutable cryptographic objects. In my current thinking for at least the streaming key material use case, I am looking at a cryptographic object (probably just a Symmetric Key) which has variable length, can be retrieved multiple times (albeit from different “offsets” in the stream) and which always returns new, unique key material (the key value). Immutable one-time pad key material is insecure. Still working this through, and willing to discuss design options. Just flagging that OTP keys may actually be another use case (if we accept Templates are) for an object with mutable value. John