GnuPG Key Plan

After much reading and analyzing the issue of re-keying (again!). I've come up with a plan for my GnuPG key security to help put some predictability in my key management.

• ~week - 2011/04/20-2011/04/22 Generate and put in place an RSA 3072-bit primary keypair.
• ~month - 2011/04/20-2011/04/30 Generate ECDSA NIST P-384 and ECDSA NIST P-521 primary keys
• ~19 years - 2030 Migrate to new ECDSA keys and revoke the RSA 3072-bit key marking it superceded.

I will put in active use my 3072-bit keypair for compatibility reasons and the fact that it should be adequate, per NIST SP800-57 Part 1, for beyond 2030. To better future-proof in case of a strong attack against RSA that compromises 3072-bit keys, I will put into practice key-signing where possible my ECDSA P-384 and P-521 keypairs. I have chosen to use 2 additional keypairs in order to better prepare for possible stronger attacks in the future. ECDSA for OpenPGP is currently an IETF draft in its 8th draft (last 7 drafts not touching ECDSA definitions)

Management of Multiple Primary Keys

With regards to key management, I intend to avoid publishing the P-384 and P-521 keys for the fact that I do not know which I will be using in the future and do not want to clutter the keyservers with keys that I will not be using in the near future. I will test key signing with at least the released version of GnuPG (2.0 series) to see if it can sign ECC keys (even though it will not likely be able to do anything with them)... hopefully this will reveal that the key management process is somewhat blind to key contents. Assuming no better mechanism arrives by the year 2030, I will probably transition to either the P-384 or P-521 ECDSA key. I intend to follow the NIST publications to watch for adjustments to the guidelines on RSA key usage for signatures.

Key Signing Policy

I will also write a key signing policy to be attached to signatures issued by my keys. One feature that I hope to be able to write in is a reasonable mechanism to commute the signature to another of their keys with a lesser level of authentication than initial key signing. Given that obtaining key signature authentication is quite a challenge in Indiana, I want to make it practical to walk keys forward instead of an extra "ordeal" to get keys resigned. I intend to read published key signing policies to come up with one that provides good practices with practicality.

Key Publication

All of my keys will be published on my primary web site at http://www.eharning.us/gpg/. My active keys will be published to the key servers through hkp://keys.gnupg.org and also independently to the PGP Global Directory. I intend to keep the naming the same beyond moves to other web page management systems for uniformity. I will also publish the key signing policy underneath that (eventually at http://www.eharning.us/gpg/key-signing-policy/). I will be signing the markdown content generating the key-signing-policy and hopefully publishing it linked directly in the web site for verification. What good is a policy if you can't verify who wrote it!

Key backup for the paranoid

When doing this GPG key work, I realized that if by some chance drives failed and USB keys no longer worked right, I'd be unable to access tons of data backed up encrypted with them. I wouldn't want to backup the GPG keys in the same way as my other data due to the sensitivity.

Some conventional methods of backup that can be used as a "standard" item to handle recovery:

• CD/DVD backup
• USB Flash Drive
• Hard Drive

Hard drive backup is somewhat out of the question as using an entire hard drive for backup and putting in a safe is out of my budget. USB flash drives paired with optical backup work great as a "fast" recovery mechanism in case something goes wrong. The problem with these is that testing them as backups is somewhat tedious.

Here's where paper comes in. You print out your key data in some form that can be input back into the computer in a reasonable manner. Now this may seem backwards, but it is quite useful for backup. You can easily print say, 10 copies of the key, slip them in something to reduce air exposure, and put them in safe deposit boxes / home safe / etc. For recovery check, you can visually inspect them to make sure that they are not degrading. To test thoroughly, you can take a small sample (ex: 1 from each backup location) and attempt a recovery. Redundancy with paper backup is quite trivial.

Now... how do you put the key on paper. You could print it in hex or base64-encode it and OCR or manually type it in... but that is tedious and error-prone. For high-density machine-readable data storage on paper you can use 2D barcodes. These typically have error-codes builtin to help manage slight flaws in the paper or scan. A good article at Coding Horror, The Paper Data Storage Option illustrates some mechanisms for paper backup. I tried stuffing backup data into QR codes and datamatrix blocks, but found that the encoding/decoding software available were quite finicky. Another problem with these formats was that they are not intended to store bulk data. There must be some other good way of encoding data for printing and recovering...

In steps in the mentioned Windows application PaperBack by Oleh Yuschuk. This tool takes an input file and prints out dotted pages arranged in blocks to store your data. It provides redundancy through duplicating blocks and arranging throughout the pages as well as error-checking codes within each individual block.

I also tried the Twibright Optar paper backup mechanism, but ran into the problem that it expected a high quality printing medium and I found it hard to tweak it to work with my readily available inkjet. Of course for final usage, laser printing would likely yield high enough quality to meet my needs.

The two backup mechanisms have their pros and cons.

PaperBack
Pros:

• Easy to use - builtin printing and scanning capabilities
• Visual display of the quality of the scan, permitting visual detection of where your backup may be degrading
• Easy customization of DPI, dot-size, redundancy
• Good reliability even in the face of injected errors through gimp

Cons:

• Windows only - right now
• Imports/Exports only as bitmap if not using direct print/scan

Twibright Optar
Pros:

• Linux-compatible
• Provided documentation describes the theory of how the encoding works well
• Better data density
• PNG input support

Cons:

• Needs hand-edited code to change dot-size
• Seems to be very sensitive to artificially introduced errors through whole-image noise/damage/rotation

I selected PaperBack as my primary backup mechanism since it met my needs and provided an easy way to tell how "bad" my backup was. I took my GPG secret key blob, sent it to PaperBack for handling and was able to pack on less than a single sheet of paper with the lowest DPI (80) and a redundancy of 10 block copies, and AES encryption of the entire data blob (beyond what GPG protects the key data with). Recovering was fast, however showed errors right from the start. These errors were quite recoverable and well within the range were errors could be recovered from. Seeing how useful paper/image-based data transfer is, I intend on using a QR or datamatrix code that has my public key information (ID/thumbprint) to help make key signing & simple detection of what key should be used for verification/encrypted-email.

With a paper copy in protected locations, I can be even more certain that the lifetime of my GPG keys will be beyond the lifetime of the machine in which they came from. The sort of thing becomes quite important when protecting information that may by chance or specifically on purpose outlive you.

8192-bit GPG Certification Key - Why and How

I generated my primary key, the certification key with an 8192-bit RSA key to help ensure that it lasts for quite some time. I figure that this should prove adequate until ECC is integrated into the OpenPGP specification and a majority of applications start supporting it. I keep this key very well protected and excluded from the set of private keys I use regularly.

Now for the how. GPG does not permit generation of 8192-bit keys normally. I found something somewhere hinting at using the batch mode of GPG key generation, but do not recall where. An example command-set that will get you a 8192-bit RSA signing key:

gpg --batch --gen-key <<EOF
Key-Type: RSA
Key-Length: 8192
Name-Real: ME
Name-Comment: COMMENT
Name-Email: EMAIL
Passphrase: PASSWORD
EOF

To segregate my certification key from the other used keys, I exported the secret portion of the subkeys using --export-secret-subkeys, wiping out the overall key, then re-importing the 'subkey' file. One downside to this sort of mechanism is that it isn't quite OpenPGP compliant and other tools such as APG cannot use the subkeys file (they complain about the missing primary key).

Venture Back to GnuPG and my GPG Key

GPG KEY:
sec#  8192R/B7CE5252 2011-04-11
    Key fingerprint = 5359 D88D 11DB 6981 C92E  A723 023C 6BB2 B7CE 5252
uid                  Thomas Harning Jr 
ssb   2048R/7B0654AB 2011-04-11 (email signing)
ssb   2048R/72F567FF 2011-04-11 (email/file decryption)
ssb   4096R/97E7681D 2011-04-11 (codesigning/etc)

I've ventured back in the the realm of GPG with its web-of-trust and easy file signing/encryption. I was prompted to do this when I realized I had no good long-term cryptography solution for dealing with documents that I want to be protected and be available in the future, even if my safe drives fail.

In my scheme I planned to have the following sort of key structure:

• Root Protected Key - large key and stored off-disk
• Machine Keys - each machine gets its own keys to manage for encryption/decryption

The problem I realized with this is that in order to do email encryption/signing, I may have to go to a specific machine to recover the data.  There is also the problem that multiple keys complicate managing trust.

When working through GPG's features, I realized I could have a similar structure without multiple independent GPG keys... GPG has the concept of subkeys that lets me do what I want with a centrally managed identity. A short little dance lets me setup a root protected key that is not on the system disk, but instead on an encrypted-removable drive. You could also do this with a hardware token, but currently keysize is limited and a hardware token has more value if you operate in a less-trusted environment or may potentially lose it.

My single key is setup as follows:

• Master key non-expiring 8192-bit RSA key with Certifier and Signing capabilities
  Stored on a hardware encrypted drive (with copies of "day-to-day" keys) and only when in a "safe" environment (ex: Linux LiveCD)
• 2048-bit Email/File signing key expiring in a few years
• 2048-bit Email/File decryption key expiring in a few years
• 4096-bit Signing key - for uses such as software signing, expiring after email keys

Request: Sign my GPG key, any measures you feel good for proving my identity, let me know. Depending on who you are, I'll try to figure out what sort of proof I'd need to cross-sign your key.

This Year's Fiction Book Plan

For one of my New Year's resolutions, I stated that I would write and publish a book this year. I believe that I may have finally come up with my subject matter. Watching Netflix movies / television episodes and listening to podcasts, I found a good working "environment" that I can write a story in.
The following bullet-points illustrate some items to work in:

• Science-Fiction Adventure w/ Mystery elements
• Team of agents (5-6?)
• Fantasy mix-in with extra-terrestrial technology/creatures
• Possible dimension/time-travel/vision/manipulation

I have ideas for how to get this put together, such as starting it off in the middle of the action with a new (or soon-to-be) agent.  He/she would then act as an audience surrogate working to unveil the status quo and start the "real" bits of action.

Depending on how the plot rolls out, I intend to at least lay out a world in which additional stories can be told, or better yet, have the potential to be a set of serial stories.

Any ideas on what can be mixed in, character ideas, or mythologies to incorporate (ex: Cthulu, Egyptian, Doctor Who, etc), are VERY welcome.

If anyone has any editing experience or knows of any "budget/free" science-fiction editors, let me know, since if I think this is quality, I'd like to polish it without relying on my skewed personal opinion.