stfe

README

System Transparency Front-End (STFE)

TODO: update README to reflect the most up-to-date design motivation, specification, and current status.

STFE is a Trillian personality that allows you to log signed checksums. What a checksum represents is up to the submitter. For example, it could be a Firefox update, a Debian package, or a document. A log leaf contains:

• A checksum that represents a data item of opaque type.
• An identifier that is tied to what the checksum represents.
• A signature over checksum and identifier using the submitter's secret signing key.
• A namespace that is tied to the submitter's verification key, e.g., think of it as a hashed public key.

The log only verifies that an entry's checksum and identifier are cryptographically signed based on the specified namespace. A client that wishes to enforce transparency logging could require that, say, a valid Debian package is only used if its checksum appears in the log with a correct namespace and identifier. This allows us to:

1. Facilitate detection of compromised signing keys, e.g., a software publisher can inspect the log to see if there are any unexpected checksums in their own signing namespace(s).
2. Ensure that everyone observe the same checksums, e.g., there should never be two log entries with identical namespaces and identifiers but checksums that differ.

Current status

STFE is at the proof-of-concept stage. We have a sketch of the log's API, which basically defines data structures, data formats, and HTTP(S) endpoints. Be warned that it is a living design document that may be incomplete and subject to major revisions. For example, we are currently thinking about data formats and which parsers are reasonable to (not) force onto client-side tooling as well as server-side implementers and operators.

There is a (very) basic client which can be used to interact with the log, e.g., to add entries and verify inclusion proofs against an STH. We have yet to add client-side support for STFE's witness cosigning APIs. Witness cosigning is part of the log's gossip-audit model, which must be well-defined to keep the log honest.¹

In the near future we will set up a public STFE prototype with zero promises of uptime, stability, etc. In the meantime you may get your hands dirty by running STFE locally. Rough documentation is available here.

Design considerations

The following is a non-exhaustive list of design considerations that we had in mind while developing STFE.

Gossip-audit model

Simply adding something into a transparency log is a great start that has merit on its own. But, to make the most of a transparency log we should keep the following factors in mind as the ecosystem bootstraps and develops:

1. Clients should verify that the signed checksums appear in a log. This requires inclusion proof verification. STFE forces inclusion proof verification by not issuing promises to log as in Certificate Transparency.²
2. Clients should verify that the log is append-only. This requires consistency proof verification.
3. Clients should verify that they see the same append-only log as everyone else. This requires a well-defined gossip-audit model.

The third point is often overlooked. While transparency logs are verifiable in theory due to inclusion and consistency proofs, it is paramount that the different parties interacting with the log see the same entries and cryptographic proofs. Therefore, we built a proactive gossip-audit model directly into STFE: witness cosigning.³ The idea is that many independent witnesses cosign the log's STH if and only if they see a consistent append-only log. If enough reputable parties run witnesses that signed-off the same STH, you can be pretty sure that you see the same log (and thus the same checksums) as everyone else.

Moreover, if you rely on witness cosigning for security, all you need from, say, a software publisher, is an artifact, a public verification key, a cosigned STH, and an inclusion proof up to that STH. To clarify why that is excellent: client-side verification becomes completely non-interactive!

Ecosystem robustness

Our long-term aspiration is that clients should fail-closed if a checksum is not transparency logged. This requires a robust log ecosystem. As more parties get involved by operating compatible logs and witnesses, the overall reliability and availability improves for everyone. An important factor to consider is therefore the minimal common denominator to transparency log checksums. As far as we can tell the log's leaf entry must at minimum indicate:

1. What public key should the checksum be attributed to.
2. What opaque data does the checksum refer to such that the log entry can be analyzed by monitors.

Additional metadata needs can be included in the data that the checksum represents, and the data itself can be stored in a public unauthenticated archive. Log APIs and data formats should also follow the principle of minimal common denominator. We are still in the process of analyzing this further.

Spam and log poisoning

Trillian personalities usually have an admission criteria that determines who can include what in the log. Without an admission criteria, the log is subject to both spam (large volumes of data) and poisoning (harmful data).

The advantage of a small leaf is that spamming the log to such an extend that it becomes a significant storage and bandwidth burden becomes harder. It also makes the log's policy easier, e.g., a max data limit is not necessary.

Because every leaf is signed it is possible to apply rate limits per namespace. As a toy example one could require that a namespace is registered before use, and that the registration component enforces a single namespace per top-level domain. To spam the log you would need an excessive number of domain names.

A more subtle advantage of not logging the actual data is that it becomes more difficult to poison the log with something harmful. Transparency logs are really cryptographic, append-only, and tamper-evident data structures: nothing can be removed or modified until the log shuts down. Therefore, as few bytes as possible should be arbitrary in the log's leaf. A reasonable goal could be to not take on a larger risk than Certificate Transparency.

1: The lack of gossip-audit models that prevent and/or detect split-views is documented quite well with regards to Certificate Transparency. See, for example, the work of Chuat et al., Nordberg et al., and Dahlberg et al..

2: So-called SCTs are signed promises that the log will merge a submitted entry within a Maximum Merge Delay (MMD), e.g., 24 hours. This adds significant system complexity because the client needs to either verify that these promises were honored after the MMD has passed, or the client must trust that the log is honest.

3: Witness cosigning was initially proposed by Syta et al.. The approach of Meiklejohn et al. is closer to ours but the details differ. For example, witnesses poll STFE for STHs rather than waiting for a single broadcast.