Should signature verification warn about unsuitable CERTS?
sop
has KEY_CANNOT_SIGN
for trying to sign with a secret key that can't make signatures (e.g. because it does not have the signature-making key usage flag, or because the algorithms it supports are too weak to legitimately sign with). But when verifying signatures, what should sop
do if it is given a correspondingly incapable CERTS
object?
If no CERTS
objects given to sop verify
are capable of making signatures, then the command will always fail. In some other cases, though, sop verify
might have multiple CERTS
objects, and some of them are incapable of making signatures while others are acceptable. A sophisticated user might want to receive a notification that they shouldn't bother checking signatures against the incapable certificate in the future.
sop
has no explicit warning channel, though warning messages are permitted on stderr. Should we encourage warning more explicitly when an unsuitable CERTS
is present, or when signatures are observed but none are found to be valid from the set of acceptable CERTS
?