[Opendnssec-develop] Refactoring of libhsm

[Siôn Lloyd]

On 05/08/11 15:40, Rickard Bellgrim wrote:
> Hi
>
> We had one task where we wanted to refactor libhsm. The main issues
> where lost connections and listing keys.
>

Sorry I missed the phone call on Wednesday. I'm not sure how this 
discussion went.

> Lost connections
> -------------------------
> Some HSMs will close down a session if it has not been used for some
> time. The idea was to redesign libhsm to handle this. Most of the
> actions in libhsm has something to do with a session, so it would be a
> lot of work to be able to restore the session. I think it would more
> suitable for the application to handle this. Like the Enforcer does
> it, to reload libhsm or make sure to close down the connections if
> they are not going to be used.
>

This works with the enforcer as it is now because the passphrase is 
available to it. If we move to a situation where user input is required 
then I think that keepalives would be desirable.

> Private vs. Public keys
> ---------------------------------
>
> There are two options here.
> 1. Detect what algorithm the key object belongs to. Will probably
> degrade the performance somewhat.
> 2. Recommend that user to disable the option<SkipPublicKey>  if they
> plan to run DAS or GOST.
>
> What do you think?

I think option 1 unless the performance hit is really significant... 
Option 2 sounds like requiring users to know in advance how the system 
might be used in the future.

Sion