Speranza: Usable, Privacy-friendly Software Signing
Name
3576915.3623200.pdf
Size
1.2 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2dd93afd75cd5cb8a52d8c862c14b7e9
Author(s)
Merrill, Kelsey
Newman, Zachary
Torres-Arias, Santiago
Sollins, Karen
Date Issued
November 15, 2023
Publisher
ACM|Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Citation
Merrill, Kelsey, Newman, Zachary, Torres-Arias, Santiago and Sollins, Karen. 2023. "Speranza: Usable, Privacy-friendly Software Signing."
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Software repositories, used for wide-scale open software distribution, are a significant vector for security attacks. Software signing provides authenticity, mitigating many such attacks. Developer-managed signing keys pose usability challenges, but certificate-based systems introduce privacy problems. This work, Speranza, uses certificates to verify software authenticity but still provides anonymity to signers using zero-knowledge identity co-commitments.
In Speranza, a signer uses an automated certificate authority (CA) to create a private identity-bound signature and proof of authorization. Verifiers check that a signer was authorized to publish a package without learning the signer's identity. The package repository privately records each package's authorized signers, but publishes only commitments to identities in a public map. Then, when issuing certificates, the CA issues the certificate to a distinct commitment to the same identity. The signer then creates a zero-knowledge proof that these are co-commitments.
We implemented a proof-of-concept for Speranza. We find that costs to maintainers (signing) and end users (verifying) are small (sub-millisecond), even for a repository with millions of packages. Techniques inspired by recent key transparency systems reduce the bandwidth for serving authorization policies to 2 KiB. Server costs in this system are negligible. Our evaluation finds that Speranza is practical on the scale of the largest software repositories.
We also emphasize practicality and deployability in this project. By building on existing technology and employing relatively simple and well-established cryptographic techniques, Speranza can be deployed for wide-scale use with only a few hundred lines of code and minimal changes to existing infrastructure. Speranza is a practical way to bring privacy and authenticity together for more trustworthy open-source software.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3576915.3623200
