Skip to content

[RFE] Support for external signers #202

@Bob131

Description

@Bob131

Signing functions in the signature and x509 modules often take PrivateKey parameters, using them in a software implementation of the signature protocol. This is an issue because it's common for signing to only be possible via some external method (think smart cards, TPMs, HSMs, SGX enclaves etc); these services try to mitigate the risk of secret key leakage by binding keys to a piece of hardware, providing an interface only for signing and not for private key extraction. It would be nice if picky supported these sorts of external signing methods as well.

For reference, Sequoia seems to do this pretty well: there is a Signer trait that is accepted by functions like SignatureBuilder::sign_hash.

(I realise that this sort of thing might entail significant API churn for which there's not likely to be much appetite; it'd be a nice feature for v8.0, though!)

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    enhancementNew feature or request

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions