Key Management Meta-issue

[aaronc]

Summary

The 3 key management modules that Regen Network worked on (fee grants, msg authorization and groups), oftentimes referred to as "subkeys" support, were postponed from the Stargate release due to time constraints. Some of this work has already been migrated to protobuf and is near completion. This meta-issue tracks their progress towards completion for the next release.

Details

The design of these modules was initially described publicly in the following gist: https://gist.github.com/aaronc/b60628017352df5983791cad30babe56. Issue #4480 describes "subkeys" functionality and influenced the design of the modules proposed below.

Fee Grants

Existing/Historical PRs:

• Enable Fee Delegation #5768
• Migrate x/feegrant to proto #5782
• Enable Fee Delegation #5207
• Add FeeAccount to StdTx and add fee-delegation module #4616

Needed for completion:

• ADR 029: Fee Grant Module #7106 ADR
• implementation (continue from Enable Fee Delegation #5768)

Msg Authorization

Existing/Historical PRs:

• Msg Authorization ADR #5235
• WIP: Add msg_authorization module #5412

Needed for completion:

• ADR 030: Authorization Module #7105 ADR (continue from Msg Authorization ADR #5235 and update to protobuf)
• implementation (continue from WIP: Add msg_authorization module #5412)

Groups

See #7633

secp256r1/NIST P-256 Signing

See #7718

[okwme]

do-not-edit-start-codetree-epic-issues

Issues in this epic:

Title	Milestone	Assignees	State
Add Group Module #7633	Feature Backlog	blushi	Open
Add secp256r1 Signing Keys #7718	v0.43	robert-zaremba	Closed
ADR 029: Fee Grant Module #7106	v0.43	N/A	Merged
ADR 030: Authorization Module #7105	v0.43	N/A	Merged

do-not-edit-end-codetree-epic-issues

cc/ @fadeev @dogemos @jgimeno @alessio @hxrts

[fadeev]

I strongly believe we should investigate WebAuthn (or to be more precise, FIDO2 CTAP) as an easy way for users to authenticate themselves.

cosmos/cosmjs#413

Relevant part of the implementation for EOS: https://github.com/EOSIO/eosio-webauthn-example-app/blob/master/src/client/wasig.ts

[aaronc]

@fadeev would WebAuthn be something we'd need to support on the blockchain side or just in client SDKs like cosmjs?

[fadeev]

@aaronc most likely there will have to be changes made to the blockchain. Primarily, due to the fact that WebAuthnas far as I know uses different signing algorithms and the one we need is in a Aug 2020 RFC.

@jordansexton can you comment on that based on your investigation into WebAuthn?

[aaronc]

@aaronc most likely there will have to be changes made to the blockchain. Primarily, due to the fact that WebAuthnas far as I know uses different signing algorithms and the one we need is in a Aug 2020 RFC.

Which signing algorithm? Is it just a different pubkey type?

[jordaaash]

WebAuthn doesn't yet support secp256k1 and it isn't supported in practice in my testing using Mac Touch ID or Google Titan keys. There is a recent RFC proposing support for it. There are some other challenges here as well. As EOSIO/eos#7421 demonstrates, more than just public key bytes would be required because of WebAuthn's attestation/assertion protocol. This implies to me that changes would be necessary to Tendermint's crypto module, the SDK, and various clients to support this.