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It’s been a while (I’ve been busy on another project, more on that soon, I hope), but finally…

I’ve updated the protocol slightly to correct a subtle bug in the secret splitting specification. You can find the latest versions and diffs here.

I’ve also finally got around to tidying the code up some (though there’s still plenty more to do), you can find an appspot server, a command line client and various libraries, all in Python, at nigori.googlecode.com. As always, patches are welcome!

The code does not fully reflect the draft protocol yet – in particular, it still uses a Schnorr signature where the draft calls for DSA.

If you want to play with the command-line client, I already have a server running on appspot. Here’s how … from the client directory, run

$ ./client.sh nigori-server.appspot.com 80 register name password
200 OK

$ ./client.sh nigori-server.appspot.com 80 authenticate name password
200 OK

Replaying: this should fail
401 Unauthorized

$ ./client.sh nigori-server.appspot.com 80 add user password name secret
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Crypto/Util/randpool.py:40: RandomPool_DeprecationWarning: This application uses RandomPool, which is BROKEN in older releases.  See http://www.pycrypto.org/randpool-broken
  RandomPool_DeprecationWarning)
200 OK
Status: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Content-Length: 0


$ ./client.sh nigori-server.appspot.com 80 get user password name 
0 at 1277559350.600000: secret

Not the most elegant interface in the world. Note that the server is experimental, I may break it, delete all the data, etc. Of course, you can run your own.

Note also that the whole protocol is experimental at this point, I wouldn’t rely on it to store your vital passwords just yet!

As promised, here are the details of the Nigori protocol (text version). I intend to publish libraries in (at least) C and Python. At some point, I’ll do a Stupid version, too.

Comments welcome, of course, and I should note that some details are likely to change as we get experience with implementation.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about phishing. Again. If we want users to take our sensible advice and use different passwords everywhere, then they’ve got to be able to remember those passwords and move them from machine to machine. In order to do that with any ease, we’ve got to store them in the cloud. But the question is, how to do that securely?

So, that’s what I’ve been working on for a while, and the result is Nigori, a protocol and open source implementation for storing secrets in the cloud. It doesn’t require you to trust anyone (other than your completely insecure client, of course … I’m working on that, too). The storage server(s) are incapable of getting hold of the keying material, and if you want you can use splits to ensure that individual servers can’t even attack the encrypted secrets.

Of course, Nigori isn’t just for passwords, you could also use it to store private keys and the like. For example, Salmon can use it to store signing keys.

The source is in a bit of a state right now, following some hack’n’slay related to appspot’s crypto … oddities, but I’ll post about that soon. For now, in case you missed it above, here’s an overview document.