Elaborate on psa_destroy_key requirements

Signed-off-by: Gilles Peskine <Gilles.Peskine@arm.com>
This commit is contained in:
Gilles Peskine 2023-08-07 16:29:19 +02:00
parent d3a797710a
commit 584bf985f5

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@ -71,6 +71,13 @@ We may want to go directly to a more sophisticated approach because when a syste
As noted above in [“Correctness out of the box”](#correctness-out-of-the-box), when a key is destroyed, it's ok if `psa_destroy_key` allows copies of the key to live until ongoing operations using the key return. In the long term, it would be good to guarantee that `psa_destroy_key` wipes all copies of the key material.
#### Summary of guarantees when `psa_destroy_key` returns
* The key identifier doesn't exist. Rationale: this is a functional requirement for persistent keys: the caller can immediately create a new key with the same identifier.
* The resources from the key have been freed. Rationale: in a low-resource condition, this may be necessary for the caller to re-create a similar key, which should be possible.
* The call must not block indefinitely, and in particular cannot wait for an event that is triggered by application code such as calling an abort function. Rationale: this may not strictly be a functional requirement, but it is an expectation `psa_destroy_key` does not block forever due to another thread, which could potentially be another process on a multi-process system.
* In the long term, no copy of the key material exists. Rationale: this is a security requirement. We do not have this requirement yet, but we need to document this as a security weakness, and we would like to become compliant.
## Resources to protect
Analysis of the behavior of the PSA key store as of Mbed TLS 9202ba37b19d3ea25c8451fd8597fce69eaa6867.