Embed Notice

@p @pwm @kallisti @nyx No one actually implements those properly, there is no good spec and only a mashup of drafts and different implementations, and no one can fix it because otherwise it breaks the network down. Misskey and Peertube tried changing the signing algorithm to some automatic signature type detection system, mastodon couldn’t handle it and decided that it’d continue rolling with RSA-SHA256; it does not support any of the alternatives, not even RSA-SHA512 and the latest drafts of HTTP signatures aren’t any better in that regard, because all of these algorithms are deprecated and the entire HTTP signature thing has been reworked. GoToSocial goes on to do yet another different thing, but dialed it back to be Mastodon-compatible. Everyone’s stuck with this way of doing things for now. That’s what happens when implementing very active IETF drafts, really… I would blame Mastodon for introducing something improperly documented (no info on how to determine actor keys without reading source, and they don’t even do it exactly right either) and incomplete (a mash of different versions for the same IETF draft), but honestly, Pleroma isn’t much better in that regard either; and I find it baffling that no proper discussion was had on this subject. Oh well.

For now, HTTP signatures are RSA-SHA256, no PSS, no SHA512, nothing; because no one supports it and it’s a disaster. And Pleroma (before one of my recent patches in develop) will fail to validate signatures for requests with a query string if you include it in your signature (/abc?a signed /abc?a would fail, /abc?a signed /abc would not) because of how poorly read the IETF draft was. Well, expect disasters around it.