Subject: [pkix] EdelWeb timestampng end of service

From: Peter Sylvester <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:46:13 +0200

Hello,

this is to inform you that the URL

  http://www.edelweb.fr/cgi-bin/service-tsp

will go out of service after many years of loyal service.
Several editors of software and others have hard coded
the old address as a default TSA in their software or
configuration files.

We are sorry for them. This URL has been deprecated
since years,  a good one can be found reading

     http://timestamping.edelweb.fr

Thanks for your attention and sorry for the inconvenience
of this message for those who are not interested in timestamping

Peter Sylvester

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From: Martin Rex <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 19:46:32 +0200 (MEST)

> of this message for those who are not interested in timestamping

Speaking of rfc3161 timestamping, most public services seem to
be limited to sha1WithRsaEncryption { 1, 2, 840, 113549, 1, 1, 5 }
which looks like an anachronism and a security problem to me.

Are the proposals or is there a standard how to migrate to
a more resonable signature algorithm such as
sha256WithRsaEncryption { 1, 2, 840, 113549, 1, 1, 11 }

e.g. when the MessageImprint uses SHA256?

While requesting this feature explicitly through a specific
TSA policy OID would theoretically be possible, this very
same approach would be quite non-portable.

The original plan was to _have_completed_ phasing out the use of SHA-1
for digital signatures by the end of 2010, but that target seems to
have been missed entirely.  There is a significant availability of
RSA 2048-bit certificates, but the use of sha256WithRsaEncryption
is still at homeopathic levels.

The purpose of rfc3161 timestamps is to prove that something existed
before or at a certain time, and the two most common uses I can
think of are:

    - determine whether a digital signature was created within
      the validity period of the signer certificate

    - determine whether a digital signature was created before
      the point in time when the signer certificate was revoked

Both these cases, a purposes looking into the future, sometimes
far into the future (think e.g. about signed&timestamped code),
and I seriously question the security of timestamps with
sha1-based signatures (or sha1-based message imprints or the
original, often indirect signatures on the underlying pkcs7/CMS)
for purposes with a useful lifetime of many years into the future.

-Martin

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From: Peter Sylvester <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:22:29 +0200

signing/finishing a contract on paper and leaving it near/in a cloud ?
you don't do that in the paperworld.