Do Qubes have any intention of following in the footsteps of TAILS as proposed below: [ see link https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/openpgp_keys/signing_key_revocation/index.en.html ] This document proposes a mechanism for the distribution and activation of the revocation certificate of the Tails signing key. Goals
Covered by current proposal: Prevent any single individual from revoking our signing key. Allow a coalition of people from ta...@boum.org to revoke our signing key in case most of the people from ta...@boum.org become unavailable. Allow a coalition of people, not necessarily from ta...@boum.org, to revoke our signing key in case everybody or almost everybody from ta...@boum.org becomes unavailable. Make it hard for a coalition of people not from ta...@boum.org to revoke our signing key unless everybody or almost everybody from ta...@boum.org becomes unavailable. People not from ta...@boum.org shouldn't know how the shares are spread and who has them. People in possession of a share of the signing key should have instructions on how to use it if needed. Groups We define four complementary groups of trusted people: Group A: people from ta...@boum.org themselves Group B Group C Group D All these people should have an OpenPGP key and understand what a revocation certificate is. Cryptographic shares We generate a revocation certificate of the signing key and split it into a number of cryptographic shares, using for example Shamir's secret sharing scheme implemented by gfshare. The following combinations of people could get together and reassemble their shares to reconstruct a complete revocation certificate: Three people from ta...@boum.org: A{3} Two people from ta...@boum.org and one person not from ta...@boum.org: A{2}+(B|C|D) One person from ta...@boum.org, and two people not from ta...@boum.org but from two different groups: A+(B|C|D){2} Three people not from ta...@boum.org but from three different groups: (B+C+D){3} We generate these shares: N shares, one for each person from ta...@boum.org 1 share for people in group B 1 share for people in group C 1 share for people in group D Who knows what People from ta...@boum.org know the composition of each group People not from ta...@boum.org: Are explained in which circumstances they should revoke the signing key Are told to write to a certain contact email address if they decide to revoke the signing key Are told that they need three different shares to reassemble the revocation certificate Infrastructure Everybody who owns a share is subscribed to a mailing list. This mailing list is hosted on a trusted server different from boum.org to be more resilient than our usual communication channels. Changing the members of the groups B, C, or D To add someone to a given group: Request someone from that group to send her share to the new person in the group. To remove someone from a given group: Send new shares to everybody except to the person who is being removed. Request everybody to delete their previous share and track this. Once everybody in 2 groups amongst B, C, or D have deleted their share, it becomes impossible for them to reassemble the revocation certificate with the previous set of shares. Let's hope that this doesn't happen very often :) Expiry There is no expiry date on revocation certificates. One way of cancelling the revocation power is to destroy all copies of shares of 2 groups amongst B, C, or D. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/o0v4t9%24rd4%241%40blaine.gmane.org. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.