Month: June 2017

The most involved thing I’ve had to learn this year is how to actually use PKCS #11 to talk to crypto hardware. It’s actually not that clear. Most of the examples are buried in random bits of C from vendors like Oracle or IBM; and the spec itself is pretty dense. Especially when it comes to understanding how you actually use it, and what all the bits and pieces do.

In honour of our Prime Minister saying he should have NOBUS access into our cryptography, which is why we should all start using hardware encryption modules (did you know you can use your TPM) and thus in order to save the next girl 6 months of poking around on a piece of hardware she doesn’t really *get*, I started a document: Applied PKCS#11.

The later sections refer to the API exposed by python-pkcs11, but the first part is generally relevant. Hopefully it makes sense, I’m super keen to get feedback if I’ve made any huge logical leaps etc.

I spent a bit of time fleshing out the support matrix for python-pkcs11 and getting things that aren’t SoftHSM into CI for integration testing (there’s still no one-command rollout for BuildBot connected to GitHub, but I got there in the end).

The nice folks at Nitrokey are also sending me some devices to widen the compatibility matrix. Also happy to make it work with CloudHSM if someone at Amazon wants to hook me up!

I also put together API docs that hopefully help to explain how to actually use the thing and added support for RFC3279 to pyasn1_modules (so you can encode your elliptic curve parameters).

Next goal is to open up my Django HSM integrations to add encrypted database fields, encrypted file storage and various other offloads onto the HSM. Also look at supporting certificate objects for all that wonderful stuff.