My concern with salting is that in the near future that may turn out not to be 
effective.  

One observation about salting low entropy keys/passwords is that if the salt is 
known to the attacker, it may provide a deterrent to rainbow tables, but not 
one to crackers like oclhashcat.
http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

The above applies to simple concatenated salt || key cracking but the trend is 
relatively clear.

Using PBKDF2 or bcrypt are probably more effective than a simple salt.  Though 
I don't think changing to a different alg for symmetric keys is going to be all 
that useful.

Low entropy symmetric keys are the problem.   That could be dealt with as a 
security consideration,  or by precluding thumbprints of symmetric keys.

John B.



> On Jan 23, 2015, at 10:46 AM, Vladimir Dzhuvinov <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> What would be a good way to pass the salt? Within the "jkt" parameter
> using some kind of a delimiter, or using a separate parameter?
> 
> We've got a use case where we need to identify shared JWKs (oct). These
> start at 128 bits. What length is generally considered low-entropy to
> require a salt to be added?
> 
> Vladimir
> 
> On 23.01.2015 14:38, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>> 
>> I just had a quick look and it seems fine for
>> asymmetric keys assuming there's a need for it
>> and a justification for including things like
>> '{"e":' in the hash input, which I don't see.
>> 
>> The reason I looked at this is that there's some
>> overlap here with RFC6920, (I'm an author of
>> that) and DANE and maybe other specs that say
>> how to hash a public key.
>> 
>> It does seem a shame to have so many ways to
>> hash public keys, but 6920 is compatible with
>> DANE and others that hash a SPKI (even if
>> that's artificially created just as a hash
>> input), so I wonder if the benefit of the
>> running code here is really worth being
>> different from other specs that hash a SPKI.
>> 
>> So, other than that someone has some code,
>> what is the benefit of being incompatible with
>> other specs here?
>> 
>> The downside is that I could not determine
>> that one of these does/doesn't map to the
>> same public key as some DANE RRs for example.
>> Seems a bit odd to me to want to accept that
>> downside unless there's an upside.
>> 
>> Only other thing is for symmetric keys I think
>> you should add an optional salt, in case you
>> need the thumbprint of a low-entropy secret,
>> which is quite likely to happen, and quite
>> likely to get exposed somehow. And I'd argue
>> to recommend that a long salt always be used
>> for potentially low-entropy secret keys.
>> 
>> Apologies if the WG discussed these before
>> but I missed it;-)
>> 
>> S.
>> 
>> PS: These are just random-punter comments with
>> no hats.
>> 
>> On 23/01/15 01:56, Jim Schaad wrote:
>>> This starts a two week last call on draft-ietf-jose-jwk-thumbprint.  Last
>>> call will end on February 2, 2015.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Due to the general lack of activity on the list.  General silence will be
>>> considered as a vote to park the document and either have it done via the
>>> ISE or with an AD shepherd rather than having group consensus.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> jose mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jose
>>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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> 
> -- 
> Vladimir Dzhuvinov :: [email protected]
> 
> _______________________________________________
> jose mailing list
> [email protected]
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