[6tisch-security] [Ace] HKDF useage in ace-cose-ecdhe-05 (fwd) Dan Harkins: [Ace] HKDF useage in ace-cose-ecdhe-05
Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca> Wed, 29 March 2017 22:02 UTC
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From: Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca>
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Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2017 18:02:23 -0400
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Subject: [6tisch-security] [Ace] HKDF useage in ace-cose-ecdhe-05 (fwd) Dan Harkins: [Ace] HKDF useage in ace-cose-ecdhe-05
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At least, for the archival and consideration of anyone who wasn't in ACE.
--- Begin Message ---
Hello,
I want to expand on my comments I made at the mic on Monday regarding
key derivation with symmetric key authentication in draft-selander-ace-
cose-ecdhe-05. When doing authentication with symmetric keys message 1 is
encrypted using K_1 and K_1 is generated by passing (as far as I can tell,
and I did admit at the mic that it's a little fuzzy) the PSK as salt and
an empty key to HKDF. This poses some problems I think.
- The only source of entropy in K_1 is the PSK and this makes the
protocol
susceptible to a passive dictionary attack[1] that would,
otherwise, not
be possible.
- It seems somewhat unhygienic, from a crypto point of view, to pass
a NULL key to a key derivation function.
- Use of the PSK in messages 2 and 3 authenticate the particular key
used in the AEAD and decryption/verification provides authentication of
the sender to the receiver. But for message 1 is different. There is
no benefit to the key exchange provided by encryption of message 1.
The sole benefit of encrypting in message 1 seems to be that EXT_1 gets
encrypted. But EXT_1 in the asymmetric case is not encrypted so there
doesn't really seem there can be much that needs protection; seems like
this is more of an opportunistic thing. That being the case, there is
little upside and considerable downside to generating K_1 and encrypting
a portion of message 1. I recommend that being removed from the draft.
regards,
Dan.
[1] a dictionary attack is defined as one where the attacker gains an
advantage from computation as opposed to interaction. The size of the
dictionary (e.g. all numbers between 0 and 2^256) only affects the
probability of success of the attack not whether it is a dictionary
attack or not.
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--- End Message ---
-- Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@sandelman.ca>, Sandelman Software Works -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-
- [6tisch-security] [Ace] HKDF useage in ace-cose-e… Michael Richardson