Hi, This would really be a great feature: I'm using CouchDB to manage grid compute jobs and having the ability to sign a document using a private key and check it server side with the public key could really make couchdb part of the grid infrastructure.
Cheers, Jan On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:17 AM, Albin Stigö <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Jens, thanks for the link. Did you ever finish the app where you were > using these techniques? > > First I naively thought that it would be enough to hash the body of > what you are going to PUT/POST and then sign that hash and include the > signature as a custom http header. I guess this would work for > verifying the data on the first post but you would not be able to > verify the signature later if couchdb does any parsing of the > transported data. > > What you are suggesting using a canonical representation of of JSON > seems like a much better idea it also apparently what oauth uses. > > I guess this would require some hacking on couchdb. It would be really > neat to have a _keys database much like the _users and for for > documents to have a _signature field. What do you thin..? > > --Albin > > > > On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 3:07 AM, Jens Alfke <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Jul 3, 2012, at 10:01 AM, Jim Klo wrote: > > > >> Yes, and as a matter of fact, i just got digital signature validation > using OpenPGP within a map function working a few minutes ago! > >> Here's a link to the relevant code: > https://github.com/jimklo/TheCollector/blob/master/dataservices/thecollector-resources/views/lib/sig_utils.js > > > > As far as I can tell, this code uses a data schema where the signed > contents are wrapped in some kind of OpenPGP encoding: > > > >> var msg_list = > openpgp.read_message(doc.digital_signature.signature); > >> for (var i=0; i<msg_list.length; i++) { > >> isValid |= msg_list[i].verifySignature(); > >> } > > > > It looks like msg_list is the actual document payload, which has to be > decoded using openpgp.read_message. > > > > This is IMHO not a very good solution because it hides the document > contents away — for example, all the map functions and any app logic that > uses documents will have to know to call read_message, which will also make > them slower. > > > > The schema I implemented (see my previous message) doesn't alter the > basic document format. The signature is in a nested object but applies to > the entire document contents (minus the signature itself of course). > There's no need to change any code that reads documents; the only time you > have to know about the signature scheme is while verifying the signature. > It's even possible to have multiple signatures on a document. > > > > —Jens >
