Starting with Windows Vista, the Plug and Play (PnP) manager performs driver signature verification during device and driver installation. However, the PnP manager can successfully verify a digital signature only if the following statements are true:
.NET Digital Signature Library 3.0 Retail
Having a valid digital signature ensures the authenticity and integrity of a driver package. However, it does not mean that the end-user or a system administrator implicitly trusts the software publisher. A user or administrator must decide whether to install or run an application on a case-by-case basis, based on their knowledge of the software publisher and application. By default, a publisher is trusted only if its certificate is installed in the Trusted Publishers certificate store.
The purpose of digital signatures is to identify data in a way that cannot easily be faked. Phishing, infected software and illegal contents published by unknown subjects can be prevented with digital signatures. Digital signatures will allow data and digital documents to be used as if they were signed paper. Browsers are now able to recognize X.509 certificates and know which Certificate Authorities are trusted. The X.509 system has grown to be the standard format for public key certificates, and is therefore the best way of proving that a document comes from the source it claims to come from.
Digital signatures are created using asymmetric cryptography, the approach on which digital signatures are based. Asymmetric Cryptography is distinguished by having two different keys, a private key to encrypt messages and a public key to decrypt them. The cryptographic private key K0 (a suitable array of bytes) is used with an appropriate algorithm to transform the initial human-readable message into a different message that is encrypted.
In practice, you will hash the message beforehand (with hash algorithm such as MD5 or SHA1), obtaining the hashed message M1. Then you will encrypt M1 with your private key K0, digitally signing your message, and, finally, you will send your message M, the encrypted hash M1 (the signature) and the public key K1 to your recipient. Your recipient will compute the hash of your message M and will compare it with the decrypted value of M1. If the two hashes matches, the signature is valid.
In reality, the AsymmetricAlgorithm class is only a base class of more complex classes. It is the base class for all the classes that implement specific asymmetric algorithms standards. Today, a widely-adopted standard for digital signature is RSA asymmetric encryption with SHA-1 hash algorithm. If the certificate contains RSA asymmetric keys pairs, the previous method does not, as one might expect, return an AsymmetricAlgorithm object, but an RSACryptoServiceProvider object, whose class derives from the AsymmetricAlgorithm class. The RSACryptoServiceProvider class contains all the properties and methods that are related to what we said previously.
If you would like to experiment digital signatures with X509 certificate, probably you need some X509 certificate for testing. We end this paper by providing you some way to gets digital certificates:
Matteo Slaviero works as Microsoft .NET Framework consultant. He recently started his own company, Cassandra, to develop new products and services related to the world of cryptography (symmetric encryption, digital signature, X509 digital certificates generation and more). Follow him on Twitter.
The above set of extensions says that this is a public key that can be used to authenticatea client (provide a client identity to a RabbitMQ node), cannot be used as a Certificate Authoritycertificate and can be used for key encipherment and digital signature.
RSA: The first, and still most common, PKC implementation, named for the three MIT mathematicians who developed it — Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. RSA today is used in hundreds of software products and can be used for key exchange, digital signatures, or encryption of small blocks of data. RSA uses a variable size encryption block and a variable size key. The key-pair is derived from a very large number, n, that is the product of two prime numbers chosen according to special rules; these primes may be 100 or more digits in length each, yielding an n with roughly twice as many digits as the prime factors. The public key information includes n and a derivative of one of the factors of n; an attacker cannot determine the prime factors of n (and, therefore, the private key) from this information alone and that is what makes the RSA algorithm so secure. (Some descriptions of PKC erroneously state that RSA's safety is due to the difficulty in factoring large prime numbers. In fact, large prime numbers, like small prime numbers, only have two factors!) The ability for computers to factor large numbers, and therefore attack schemes such as RSA, is rapidly improving and systems today can find the prime factors of numbers with more than 200 digits. Nevertheless, if a large number is created from two prime factors that are roughly the same size, there is no known factorization algorithm that will solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time; a 2005 test to factor a 200-digit number took 1.5 years and over 50 years of compute time. In 2009, Kleinjung et al. reported that factoring a 768-bit (232-digit) RSA-768 modulus utilizing hundreds of systems took two years and they estimated that a 1024-bit RSA modulus would take about a thousand times as long. Even so, they suggested that 1024-bit RSA be phased out by 2013. (See the Wikipedia article on integer factorization.) Regardless, one presumed protection of RSA is that users can easily increase the key size to always stay ahead of the computer processing curve. As an aside, the patent for RSA expired in September 2000 which does not appear to have affected RSA's popularity one way or the other. A detailed example of RSA is presented below in Section 5.3.
Diffie-Hellman: After the RSA algorithm was published, Diffie and Hellman came up with their own algorithm. Diffie-Hellman is used for secret-key key exchange only, and not for authentication or digital signatures. More detail about Diffie-Hellman can be found below in Section 5.2.
Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA): The algorithm specified in NIST's Digital Signature Standard (DSS), provides digital signature capability for the authentication of messages. Described in FIPS PUB 186-4.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC): A PKC algorithm based upon elliptic curves. ECC can offer levels of security with small keys comparable to RSA and other PKC methods. It was designed for devices with limited compute power and/or memory, such as smartcards and PDAs. More detail about ECC can be found below in Section 5.8. Other references include the Elliptic Curve Cryptography page and the Online ECC Tutorial page, both from Certicom. See also RFC 6090 for a review of fundamental ECC algorithms and The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for details about the use of ECC for digital signatures.
The Skein Hash Function Family: The Skein Hash Function Family was proposed to NIST in their 2010 hash function competition. Skein is fast due to using just a few simple computational primitives, secure, and very flexible — per the specification, it can be used as a straight-forward hash, MAC, HMAC, digital signature hash, key derivation mechanism, stream cipher, or pseudo-random number generator. Skein supports internal state sizes of 256, 512 and 1024 bits, and arbitrary output lengths.
Figure 4 puts all of this together and shows how a hybrid cryptographic scheme combines all of these functions to form a secure transmission comprising a digital signature and digital envelope. In this example, the sender of the message is Alice and the receiver is Bob.
The digital signature is formed in two steps. First, Alice computes the hash value of her message; next, she encrypts the hash value with her private key. Upon receipt of the digital signature, Bob recovers the hash value calculated by Alice by decrypting the digital signature with Alice's public key. Bob can then apply the hash function to Alice's original message, which he has already decrypted (see previous paragraph). If the resultant hash value is not the same as the value supplied by Alice, then Bob knows that the message has been altered; if the hash values are the same, Bob should believe that the message he received is identical to the one that Alice sent.
This scheme also provides nonrepudiation since it proves that Alice sent the message; if the hash value recovered by Bob using Alice's public key proves that the message has not been altered, then only Alice could have created the digital signature. Bob also has proof that he is the intended receiver; if he can correctly decrypt the message, then he must have correctly decrypted the session key meaning that his is the correct private key.
On a related topic, public key crypto schemes can be used for several purposes, including key exchange, digital signatures, authentication, and more. In those PKC systems used for SKC key exchange, the PKC key lengths are chosen so as to be resistant to some selected level of attack. The length of the secret keys exchanged via that system have to have at least the same level of attack resistance. Thus, the three parameters of such a system — system strength, secret key strength, and public key strength — must be matched. This topic is explored in more detail in Determining Strengths For Public Keys Used For Exchanging Symmetric Keys (RFC 3766).
Typically, a certificate contains a public key, a name, an expiration date, the name of the authority that issued the certificate (and, therefore, is vouching for the identity of the user), a serial number, any pertinent policies describing how the certificate was issued and/or how the certificate may be used, the digital signature of the certificate issuer, and perhaps other information. 2ff7e9595c
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