Awesome
DSSE: Dead Simple Signing Envelope
Simple, foolproof standard for signing arbitrary data.
Features
- Supports arbitrary message encodings, not just JSON.
- Authenticates the message and the type to avoid confusion attacks.
- Avoids canonicalization to reduce attack surface.
- Allows any desired crypto primitives or libraries.
See Background for more information, including design considerations and rationale.
What is it?
Specifications for:
- Protocol (required)
- Data structure, a.k.a. "Envelope" (recommended)
- (pending #9) Suggested crypto primitives
Out of scope (for now at least):
- Key management / PKI / exclusive ownership
Why not...?
- Why not raw signatures? Too fragile.
- Why not JWS? Too many insecure implementations and features.
- Why not PASETO? JSON-specific, too opinionated.
- Why not the legacy TUF/in-toto signature scheme? JSON-specific, relies on canonicalization.
See Background for further motivation.
Who uses it?
<!-- Reminder: once in-toto and TUF switch to this new format, update the rest of the docs that currently reference the old format as "current", "existing", etc. -->How can we use it?
- There is a Python implementation in this repository.
- There's a DSSE library for Go in go-securesystemslib.
- SigStore includes a Go implementation that supports hardware tokens, cloud KMS systems, and more.
Versioning
The DSSE specification follows semantic versioning, and is released using Git
tags. The master branch points to the latest release. Changes to the
specification are submitted against the devel branch, and are merged into
master when they are ready to be released.