In August, NIST published FIPS 203, FIPS 204, and FIPS 205, the first standards for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).
Though we do not yet have a cryptography-relevant quantum computer, it is important to begin adopting algorithms that will continue to be secure after one has been built in the future. NIST prioritized PQC to give the technology industry adequate time to migrate their cryptography. This decision was partly informed by the failure of NSA and NIST to migrate everyone off RSA and towards Elliptic Curve Cryptography, even years after they published Suite B.
As W3Techs has reported over the years, the majority of websites on the Internet whose server-side language is detectable are powered by PHP. It stands to reason that making these algorithms available to the PHP community could make an enormous difference in the adoption of Post-Quantum Cryptography.
Several years ago, we designed sodium_compat: a pure-PHP implementation of (most of) libsodium. It has since been installed over 60 million times, not counting WordPress.
Our goals with sodium_compat were as follows:
To repeat ourselves a bit, this was several years ago. The PHP community has evolved. WordPress now requires PHP 7.0 to function (although they do recommend 7.4). As of this writing, the oldest still-supported version of PHP is 8.2 (8.1 if you count "security fixes only"). We asked ourselves, and the /r/PHP subreddit, if anyone still even needs PHP 5 support in 2024.
The answer was a resounding, "No."
That's the background story, anyway. If you're a busy developer, the remainder of this post will be broken down into a Q&A format to explain what's changing, what's not changing, what you need to do, and whether you need to do anything.
Since our company's inception in 2015, we've sought to make the Internet more secure for everyone.
Up front, this required doing a lot of the sort of work that benefits society but most companies wouldn't invest time or money in:
So why did we?
We reasoned that, in the long term, simply doing important work that benefits everyone is cheaper than airtime when it comes to advertising a security consulting company.
(And we were right! Our clients have been keeping us very busy. Hence, the drop in update frequency for our company blog for the past few years.)
However, we didn't get a lot of practice with marketing or advertising, which means some of the important work we've done over the years went unnoticed. For example: Sigstore does 2/3 of what Gossamer does, but the Sigstore team hadn't heard about it until a recent Hacker News thread.
To correct this oversight, we thought it would be helpful to provide a recap of some of the projects we've worked on since our inception that are still active today, and most importantly, why they matter for the security of the Internet.
To assert that "There exist supply-chain security risks" in any software ecosystem doesn't require a formal analysis nor multiple experts to peer review such a notion. It's kind of a given, especially with recent tech news.
However, it's not a new problem. We were vocal about it in 2015, when it was common practice for software projects to tell you to install their widget by running curl http://some-domain | sh in a terminal window. This specific anti-pattern had already been criticized widely by others since at least 2013, but we were more interested in proposing a general solution to secure code delivery.
The only things that have really changed in the intervening years are:
That last item might seem bold, but we've been laying the groundwork for elegantly solving these problems for the PHP ecosystem since our company's inception. We had briefly introduced our complete solution when we announced that WordPress would cryptographically sign its automatic updates in 2019. (If you'd like more depth into this subject, we've previously written about supply-chain security in 2017 and automatic security updates in 2016.)
Part of making an acceptable solution even possible required getting modern cryptography into PHP and writing a pure-PHP polyfill of ext/sodium for legacy versions of PHP. (These are just two of the things that we're known for in the PHP community.)
So with all that in mind, let's take a quick look at Gossamer, our proposal for securing the software supply-chain for the PHP ecosystem.
Last month, Thomas Ptacek wrote API Tokens: A Tedious Survey on the fly.io blog, which talks about all things API Token.
His post covered JWT, PASETO (our design), and a few other token formats. He went on to clarify, on Hacker News, that:
The one thing I'm not super comfortable about here is my PASETO take. My attitude going in was that PASETO has a lot of boosters and not a lot of critical takes. I can beat up on Macaroons because we're using them, and I'm going to follow up with a post about what our Macaroons like like. I'm not doing that with PASETO. So, like, I stand by it, but take it for what it's worth.
What was his take, exactly? Our succinct understanding of the criticisms laid out in the fly.io article are as follows:
Out of these criticisms, the first two are actionable and warrant further inspection, while the latter are Thomas's opinion.
Will tomorrow bring costly and embarrassing data breaches? Or will it bring growth, success, and peace of mind?
Our team of technology consultants have extensive knowledge and experience with application security and web/application development.
We specialize in cryptography and secure PHP development.
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