Client certificates in diohsc

I just finished adding client certificate support to my line-based textual gemini client diohsc. This involved making some non-trivial choices, and I didn't copy av98 in all cases, so I hope discussing the decisions I made and the reasoning behind them could be of use to other client developers and in refining the spec.

User interface

The technical terminology "client certificate", which describes an implementation detail rather than the underlying concept, is mostly hidden from the user. Instead, the client talks about "identities". An identity is just a client certificate along with an optional name.

In diohsc, there are two kinds of identity -- temporary anonymous identities and long-term named identities. The latter are saved to disc, the former are held only in memory.

There is no way to name and save an anonymous identity. Allowing it would complicate the UI and the conceptual distinction between the two kinds of identity.

Creating identities

When 61 is received, the user is asked if they want to create an anonymous identity.

On any other 6* error code, the user may select an existing named identity or create a new named or anonymous identity, and then retry the request.

When creating a named identity, the user is prompted to set a Common Name (which can be empty). This is the only choice required of the user. It would make for a neater UI to automatically set the Common Name to be the name of the identity, and in some ways it would make sense. But the user may well want to use the same Common Name (e.g. "anon" or "") on multiple servers without a common identity.

Using identities

An identity can be set to be used on a given server at and below a given URI path. So you can have one identity in use for gemini://foo.bar/~quux/..., and another for gemini://foo.bar/~xuuq/...

Whenever an URI is shown to the user, it is annotated with the identity, if any, which would be used if it were requested; e.g. "gemini://foo.bar/~xuuq/hello.gmi[clarkKent]". This includes relative URIs in links. So the user knows when they're going to use what identity.

Colouring is used to visually separate the annotation from the URI (but '[' and ']' are reserved characters in URIs, so this isn't actually necessary).

Anonymous identities are denoted as "[]".

If the user requests an URI which would use an identity which hasn't been used in 30m, they are asked to confirm whether they want to still use it. If they don't want to, the identity is disabled for this path.

Controlling identities

There is a single new command added to deal with identities: "identify [URI]". If URI is missing, it defaults to the current URI (if any).

If there is an identity in use at the URI, after confirmation it is removed.

Otherwise the user is prompted to select an existing identity or create a new one, as if 60 had been received.

Certificates

To minimise information leakage to the server, all certificates, for both anonymous and named identities, are created the same way apart from the Common Name.

The expiration date is set to 2 years in the future. I'm not sure if this is the best compromise.

The "valid from" date is set to 1 year in the past. Why not set it to the current time? It's a known problem that users "in the wild" often don't have correctly set clocks -- they don't set the right time zone, then set the clock to make the time "look right". Since gemini servers are meant to be widely deployed, we shouldn't expect either client or server to have the right time. So we should backdate certificates by at least a couple of days, and then a year seems a nice round safe choice.

The serial number is set to 0, no extensions are set, and the distinguished name consists only of the Common Name.

The key is 2048 bit RSA with public exponent e=65537, and with hash algorithm SHA256. I would have liked to use Ed25519, which is more efficient in size and processing, but not all servers accept it.

Fingerprinting

Currently, these choices identify diohsc uniquely. Hopefully a future version of the spec will suggest defaults to prevent such fingerprinting, and I think these would be reasonable choices. But it could be worth considering mandating Ed25519, even if this means only TLS1.3 servers can use client certificates. This can be considered an "advanced" feature for a server, so it isn't so much of a problem if some servers aren't capable of it.

Libraries

I used Vincent Hanquez's excellent pure-haskell cryptography libraries to create and use client certificates. Neither openssl nor gnu-tls are involved at all.