Using the Nitrokey HSM with GPG in macOS

Getting yourself set up in macOS to sign keys using a Nitrokey HSM with gpg is non-trivial. Allegedly (at least some) Nitrokeys are supported by scdaemon (GnuPG’s stand-in abstraction for cryptographic tokens) but it seems that the version of scdaemon in brew doesn’t have support.

However there is gnupg-pkcs11-scd which is a replacement for scdaemon which uses PKCS #11. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a hassle to set up.

There’s a bunch of things you’ll want to install from brew: opensc, gnupg, gnupg-pkcs11-scd, pinentry-mac, openssl and engine_pkcs11.

brew install opensc gnupg gnupg-pkcs11-scd pinentry-mac \
    openssl engine-pkcs11

gnupg-pkcs11-scd won’t create keys, so if you’ve not made one already, you need to generate yourself a keypair. Which you can do with pkcs11-tool:

pkcs11-tool --module /usr/local/lib/opensc-pkcs11.so -l \
    --keypairgen --key-type rsa:2048 \
    --id 10 --label 'Danielle Madeley'

The --id can be any hexadecimal id you want. It’s up to you to avoid collisions.

Then you’ll need to generate and sign a self-signed X.509 certificate for this keypair (you’ll need both the PEM form and the DER form):

/usr/local/opt/openssl/bin/openssl << EOF
engine -t dynamic \
    -pre SO_PATH:/usr/local/lib/engines/engine_pkcs11.so \
    -pre ID:pkcs11 \
    -pre LIST_ADD:1 \
    -pre LOAD \
    -pre MODULE_PATH:/usr/local/lib/opensc-pkcs11.so
req -engine pkcs11 -new -key 0:10 -keyform engine \
    -out cert.pem -text -x509 -days 3640 -subj '/CN=Danielle Madeley/'
x509 -in cert.pem -out cert.der -outform der
EOF

The flag -key 0:10 identifies the token and key id (see above when you created the key) you’re using. If you want to refer to a different token or key id, you can change these.

And import it back into your HSM:

pkcs11-tool --module /usr/local/lib/opensc-pkcs11.so -l \
    --write-object cert.der --type cert \
    --id 10 --label 'Danielle Madeley'

You can then configure gnupg-agent to use gnupg-pkcs11-scd. Edit the file ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:

scdaemon-program /usr/local/bin/gnupg-pkcs11-scd
pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-mac

And the file ~./gnupg/gnupg-pkcs11-scd.conf:

providers nitrokey
provider-nitrokey-library /usr/local/lib/opensc-pkcs11.so

gnupg-pkcs11-scd is pretty nifty in that it will throw up a (pin entry) dialog if your token is not available, and is capable of supporting multiple tokens and providers.

Reload gpg-agent:

gpg-agent --server gpg-connect-agent << EOF
RELOADAGENT
EOF

Check your new agent is working:

gpg --card-status

Get your key handle (grip), which is the 40-character hex string after the phrase KEY-FRIEDNLY (sic):

gpg-agent --server gpg-connect-agent << EOF
SCD LEARN
EOF

Import this key into gpg as an ‘Existing key’, giving the key grip above:

gpg --expert --full-generate-key

You can now use this key as normal, create sub-keys, etc:

gpg -K
/Users/danni/.gnupg/pubring.kbx
-------------------------------
sec> rsa2048 2017-07-07 [SCE]
 1172FC7B4B5755750C65F9A544B80C280F80807C
 Card serial no. = 4B43 53233131
uid [ultimate] Danielle Madeley <danielle@madeley.id.au>

echo -n "Hello World" | gpg --armor --clearsign --textmode

Side note: the curses-based pinentry doesn’t deal with piping content into stdin, which is why you want pinentry-mac.

Terminal console showing a gpg signing command. Over the top is a dialog box prompting the user to insert her Nitrokey token

You can also import your certificate into gpgsm:

gpgsm --import < ca-certificate
gpgsm --learn-card

And that’s it, now you can sign your git tags with your super-secret private key, or whatever it is you do. Remember that you can’t exfiltrate the secret keys from your HSM in the clear, so if you need a backup you can create a DKEK backup (see the SmartcardHSM docs), or make sure you’ve generated that revocation certificate, or just decided disaster recovery is for dweebs.

python-pkcs11 with the Nitrokey HSM

So my Nitrokey HSM arrived and it works great, thanks to the Nitrokey peeps for sending me one.

Because the OpenSC PKCS #11 module is a little more lightweight than some of the other vendors, which often implement mechanisms that are not actually supported by the hardware (e.g. the Opencryptoki TPM module), I wrote up some documentation on how to use the device, focusing on how to extract the public keys for using outside of PKCS #11, as the Nitrokey doesn’t implement any of the public key functions.

Nitrokey with python-pkcs11

This also encouraged me to add a whole bunch more of the import/extraction functions for the diverse key formats, including getting very frustrated at the lack of documentation for little things like how OpenSSL stores EC public keys (the answer is as SubjectPublicKeyInfo from X.509), although I think there might be some operating system specific glitches with encoding some DER structures. I think I need to move from pyasn1 to asn1crypto.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia
This work by Danielle Madeley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia.