Generic digest for rsa::pkcs1v15::Signature?

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
cryptography

Research direction

Start with the RSA signing-key implementation at src/pkcs1v15/signing_key.rs, which the issue identifies as carrying the digest information, and inspect the corresponding PKCS#1 v1.5 and PSS signature types. Determine whether the API can distinguish signatures by digest without breaking the generic signature traits. Done means reaching and documenting a clear API decision, with affected behavior and coverage identified.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hey Tony, long time no chat!

I'm using RustCrypto in a project involving JOSE. I have some fairly open ended extensibility requirements, so I'm leveraging RustCrypto's generic signature traits as much as possible, to support users defining their own signing implementations, such as over WebCrypto with wasm, or using an HSM. As part of this, I've defined a trait for mapping RustCrypto signature encodings to their corresponding algorithm name in JWA.

This is generally working great, for most signature types:

pub trait JWSSignature: SignatureEncoding {
    const ALGORITHM: jose_jwa::Signing;
}

impl JWSSignature for ecdsa::Signature<p256::NistP256> {
    const ALGORITHM: jose_jwa::Signing = jose_jwa::Signing::Es256;
}

impl JWSSignature for ecdsa::Signature<k256::Secp256k1> {
    const ALGORITHM: jose_jwa::Signing = jose_jwa::Signing::Es256K;
}

But I run into issues with RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 and RSASSA-PSS signatures, as implemented in the rsa crate, because their corresponding signature types don't specify the hash function used in the signature, and so there isn't a 1:1 mapping between signatures and their JWA name.

For example:

impl JWSSignature for rsa::pkcs1v15::Signature {
    // Might be Rs256, Rs384, or Rs512
    const ALGORITHM: jose_jwa::Signing = ???;
}

This information is available on the corresponding signing key types for both variants of RSA signatures, so I'm wondering whether it would make sense for the digest type to also be tracked on the signatures themselves, in order to differentiate between signatures which use different hash functions.

In my case, it's not the end of the world if this isn't supported, because no one should really be deploying RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 using SHA-512 anyway, but that I ran into this limitation in the first place had me wondering whether it was a gap in the API worth thinking about.

Thanks for all the great work here, I'm really enjoying how the whole ecosystem slots together so nicely :)

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
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Forks
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