Skip to content

SPB

The SPB module APIs are designed for encoding and decoding messages in the SPB (Brazilian Payment System) standard, in accordance with the RSFN (National Financial System Network) Security Manual published by BACEN (Central Bank of Brazil).

Info

The current implementation is in line with version 5.0 of the RSFN Security Manual published by BACEN in June 2021.

The Brazilian Payment System (SPB) works on a system of message exchanges between financial institutions, on a private network called RSFN. The standards are defined and published by the Central Bank. All messages exchanged are encrypted and digitally signed, using a digital envelope scheme. The SPB module is responsible for handling message security.

Info

The use of the SPB module in a scenario with several HSMs must be done with the HSM replication mechanism configured and operational, so that the certificate base in the HSMs is always synchronized and complete, regardless of which HSM was used by the application in each operation.

The SPB module basically performs three functions: Encode and Decode in SPB messages, and management of SPB certificates.

Encode is performed on the messages going to the output queue and consists of:

  1. Sign the content (hash) of the message with the private key corresponding to the institution's own certificate (origin);
  2. Generate a symmetric session key;
  3. Cipher the message with the symmetric key;
  4. Cipher the symmetric key with the public key in the certificate of the institution receiving the message;
  5. Set up the security header;
  6. Deliver the result header+encrypted message to the application, which will put everything in an output queue;

Decode does the reverse process, acting on messages that arrive in the input queue;

  1. It receives the encrypted message and the SPB header;
  2. Decrypts the symmetric key with the institution's own private key (destination)
  3. Decrypts the message with the symmetric key;
  4. Verifies the digital signature with the public key in the certificate of the sending institution (origin)
  5. Delivers the open message to the application;

Every operation with public and private keys is linked to the use of X.509 certificates, so in addition to Encode and Decode the SPB module also needs to have some certificate management.

Each institution is identified in the SPB by its ISPB code (8 digits) and can exchange messages in so-called message domains, each of which requires a different certificate. Each institution can only have one active certificate at a time in a domain.

In the SPB module, institutions (and their equivalent certificates) can only be identified by the ISPB code.

The SPB module is responsible for encrypting messages in accordance with BACEN definitions, and the SPB communication structure can be used by other systems between financial institutions motivated by the emergence of new applications within BACEN, for example:

  1. SPB operates the STR - Resource Transfer System (STR01)
  2. MES operates Sisbacen (MES01, MES02)
  3. CIP operates the SCG - Guarantee Control System and C3 - Central Credit Assignment System.

Each of these systems can have a key/certificate and will be treated as a domain in the messaging control application. If the institution operates more than one ISPB, each of them must access a separate key partition within the HSM. There are cases where an institution can operate MES/SPB with the same key/certificate.

In HSM, certificate management is done using Maps, which are pointing and reference objects. All references in the SPB module are to Maps, not to keys and certificates.

Regarding the internal naming described below, the idea is that keys, certificates and maps are managed by the specialized SPB functions of the HSM client library, so that these naming rules are completely transparent to the application, which only needs to search for the ISBP code.

Keeping Certificates

If the Encode and Decode functions only needed to handle messages using active certificates, it would be enough to keep these certificates in the base, but there are cases, such as an auditing process, where the application needs to open or verify the signature of an old message that was generated using a certificate that has already been deactivated (or will still be activated in the future). This is why HSM needs to keep and accumulate all the certificates in the base, both its own and those of third parties, as they are imported, activated and deactivated.

UTF-16BE format

The BACEN manual specifies that XML messages must be represented in Unicode UTF-16BE format. It doesn't matter for HSM, since the content that will be signed and encrypted in Encode will be exactly that sent by the user.

Attention

HSM does not perform automatic format conversion, either at the Encode input or at the Decode output.

Special treatment

The manual mentions messages and file pointers that can be included in the content of an SPB message. The difference is that XML messages must be represented in UTF-16BE format, while files do not have this requirement.

This distinction between message and file is important for the caller, as they will decide whether they need to convert the format or not before sending it to the HSM.

In the case of messages indicating compressed content, the premise of the implementation is that the sender has the necessary compression infrastructure, so the HSM signs and encrypts what the application passes in Encode, while in the case of the recipient the premise is that they may not have the decompression infrastructure at hand, so the HSM decompresses the content in Decode and delivers the decompressed content, including automatically detecting whether the standard used is gzip or pkzip.

All messages sent are signed, and some may be for public use, with no specified recipient.

C04 Message Archive Signed Ciphered Zipped Recipient Encode Decode
0
1 use cert not yet activated use cert not yet activated
2 public accepts blank destination accepts blank destination
3
4
6 public accepts blank destination accepts blank destination
8 you should already receive it zipped unzips automatically
10 public you should already receive it zipped unzips automatically

Automatic certificate exchange

By Bacen's definition, the exchange and activation of SPB certificates is done within the system using specific messages.

The HSM can detect this type of message in Decode and promote the exchange of the certificate on the HSM 's base automatically, without the application having to explicitly call the certificate activation API.

This is a parameterization option for the Decode call.

The HSM will handle the decode of GEN0007 (certificate update notice via BACEN broadcast) and the response to a GEN0008 (a query to the digital certificate, whose response is a GEN0008R1), as well as GEN0018 (BACEN certificate). For HSM, GEN0007 and the answer to GEN0008 are equivalent. In the case of GEN0018, the certificate in the message is imported, but it is not activated automatically, because the manual specifies that BACEN sends the messages at least 03 days before activation; so the application is responsible for controlling the time between receipt and activation; and to activate it is enough to inform CA and NS, because the certificate will already be imported into the HSM base.

The GEN0006 message is used by institutions to inform BACEN of the activation or update of the status of a certificate. In the HSM, this message (and also the GEN0006R1 response) is not treated specially, as it does not require changes to the local base.

The normal operation flow for activating a new certificate involves a GEN0006 message from the institution to BACEN, which then sends a GEN0007 broadcast message informing all participants that the institution's certificate must be changed. As the institution itself also receives this GEN0007, it is at this point (during Decode) that the application can instruct the HSM to automatically activate the new certificate in its local base.

Certificate format

Internally, HSM only operates, imports and exports certificates in DER (binary) format, but in the library the certificate import operations support both DER and PEM (base64) format, with automatic detection.

Nomenclature

The HSM SPB module allows you to perform encoding and decoding operations on SPB messages using keys and certificates within the HSM.

This means that the entire base of certificates and private keys of the institution itself and of the institutions with which the bank communicates will be stored and centralized in the HSM, without the need for external control.

The identification of the keys and certificates to be used is done using the ISPB code of the institutions in a way that is natural for the calling applications, instead of the common model of using the native identifiers of the keys and certificates.

To make this relationship of ISPB with keys and certificates, an object in the HSM called map was used, which simply links an ISPB to a private key and/or a certificate. This makes it possible to pass only the ISPB to an SPB encoding call instead of a key name.

Key nomenclature

In order to make it easier to use, a formation law is defined for the names of these objects.

  1. Key names: k_<ISPB>_<dom>_<yyyymmddhhmmss>
  2. k: 01 character, literal
  3. <ISBP>: 08 characters, ISPB code
  4. <dom>: up to 05 characters, domain
  5. <yyyymmddhhmmss>: 14 characters, timestamp GMT-0 at the time of key generation.

Total: up to 31 characters, e.g: k_12345678_str01_20131029110223

  1. Names of certificates: c_<ISPB>_<dom>_<yyyymmddhhmmss>
  2. c: 01 character, literal
  3. <ISBP>: 08 characters, ISPB code
  4. <dom>: up to 05 characters, domain
  5. <yyyymmddhhmmss>: 14 characters, timestamp GMT-0 from the moment the certificate was imported.

Total: up to 31 characters, e.g: c_12345678_spb_20131101120334 The same training law applies to third-party certificates.

Map

O map is simply an internal object of HSM who guards the Ids of two other objects. In the case of the SPB module, the Id of the certificate and the Id of the private key. Each Id occupies a position within the map called slot.

Map nomenclature

Since every message involves certificate processing, the SPB module needs a way of uniquely identifying each certificate for each institution in each domain. According to the Bacen standard, each certificate has a serial number (SN) of up to 32 bytes, defined by the Certificate Authority (CA) that issues it, but there is no guarantee that serial numbers are globally unique, so the identification of the certificate needs to include information on the CA (each CA in the SPB has an identification byte) and the NS, which exceeds the 32-character limit for HSM identifiers; RFC 3280 also makes this distinction to uniquely identify a certificate. The Ids of the certificate maps used in the SPB module use a name compression scheme.

The solution adopted is an MD5 hash, which is exactly 16 bytes long (32 characters) and does not produce a collision for this use case. The definition of what will go into the composition of the hash is (CA+NS)where CA e SN are made up of uppercase hexadecimal characters.

  • CA has size 2, representing one byte.
  • SN has size 32 and must be completed with zero padding to the left (according to SPB security manual 3.2) when the SN size of the certificate is less than 32.
  • The CA+SN concatenation must be done without counting NULL terminators.

Active certificate maps will be identified as <ISPB>_<dom> at the base of the HSMand the application will refer to them as ISPB@dom. O @ is adopted to improve naming on the client, internally in the firmware @ is translated into _.

The use of @dom by the calling application is optional; the institution may not use application domains.

From the point of view of the calling application, it can refer to maps as ISPB@dom or CA@NSto use the same Encode/Decode API. The HSM detects it automatically.

Maps allow slots to point to an FQN, meaning that the certificate and key can be in different partitions. In any case, the map must always exist in the partition of the logged-in user, even if the ids pointed to in the slots are in another partition. In principle, the best way to use it is to keep all the certificates and keys of an ISPB on the same partition, without references to remote partitions.

To make it easier to identify objects and search for ISPBs, active certificates and certificate+private key pairs have a MAP with the ISPB identifier.

All certificates and pairs certificates+private keysregardless of whether they are active or not have a MAP with id MD5(CA+SN) for identification and history, where CA is the identifier of the Certificate Authority and SN is the certificate's serial number.

The name of the map object is the identifier of the institution, which can be of 2 types:

  1. CA@SN
  2. CA (Certificate Authority) and NS (Serial Number) of the certificate.
  3. An MD5 hash is made of this data and the result is the name of the MAP.

  4. This map is automatically generated for all certificates and certificate + private key pairs when imported via SPB APIs (e.g: DSPBImportCertificate(), ...). Example: 03@00000000000000000000000087654321

  5. ISPB@Dominio

  6. A map-specific name is generated using ISPB and DOMINIO.
  7. The domain is not mandatory. Identifiers can only be created with ISPB.
  8. This type of map is only generated for active certificates and certificate+key pairs.
  9. Removing this map makes the corresponding certificate inactive. Example: 12345678@MES01

The API documentation states whether both types of identifier are accepted or just one of them.

Multiple partitions

If you want to use objects in other users' partitions, you must specify the partition id in the identifier.

The indication is made by adding the name of the partition where the objects are located at the beginning of the identifier, separated by /.

Example: usuario/12345678@MES01

Encode

The sequence of APIs DSPBEncodeInit(), DSPBEncodeCont() e DSPBEncodeEnd() perform an SPB message encoding operation.

The call structure with init/cont/end sequence allows the calling application to use the API with any message size, including large files.

The use of parameters with source and destination ISBP identifiers in APIs aims to increase the level of verification between what the application actually has (the SPB message) and what it thinks it has (the API parameters).

The encryption operation does not change the message representation format, so the application must send the message as defined by the Central Bank (e.g. UTF-16BE). The message will be encrypted and signed as it is received.

Decode

The sequence of APIs DSPBDecodeInit(), DSPBDecodeCont() e DSPBDecodeEnd() perform an SPB message decoding operation.

The call structure with init/cont/end sequence allows the calling application to use the API with any message size.

The use of source and destination ISBP parameters in APIs is intended to increase the level of verification between what the application actually has (the SPB message) and what it thinks it has (the API parameters).

During decode the firmware of the HSM is able to detect that the message is about a certificate change and perform this update and activation automatically (without the need for further action by the application). bAutoUpdateCert must be on.

The decoding operation does not change the message representation format. The message will be passed to the application as it was deciphered.

Graphic Console

To facilitate management and abstract away the more complex details of the SPB module, the HSM manufacturer provides a graphical console (SPBSec Console). Through it, all operations relating to loading and activating certificates, generating keys and certificate requests, creating and viewing domains, permitting partitions and many others can be easily carried out.

See the Downloads page for the SPB module's graphical console (SPBSec Console).

Some screenshots are shown below.

Different domains

Different domains

Certificate activation option

Certificate activation option

Message encode and docode operation

Message encode and docode operation

SPB header

SPB header

API SPB

Specific API documentation for the SPB module, with functions, classes and examples.