Re: [Cfrg] Multi-recipient public key authenticated encryption

[Paul Grubbs <[e-mail]>]

Yes, as long as keying is done correctly (the CBC and HMAC keys must be
derived from a single parent key) then CBC+HMAC is compactly committing.

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 10:26 AM Neil Madden <[e-mail]> wrote:

> That is interesting, thanks. JOSE does also support AES-CBC + HMAC (EtM),
> so it may perhaps then be simpler to forbid the use of GCM for
> multi-recipient messages in this spec and save myself a lot of trouble. It
> seems from your papers that CBC+HMAC is one of the schemes you looked at
> and it would be compactly committing, so this is fortunate.
>
>
> On 7 May 2020, at 14:39, [e-mail] wrote:
>
> Oh ok, it’s too bad JOSE only supports GCM. You should be careful with
> using plain GCM in these multi-receiver settings - because it’s
> non-committing, it’s possible to craft a single ciphertext that different
> receivers decrypt to different plaintexts.
>
>
> On May 7, 2020, at 7:28 AM, Neil Madden <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Apologies, I forgot to respond to this. I think the ccAE approach is a
> nice way of solving the problem. Unfortunately, JOSE allows specifying the
> key exchange algorithm and AEAD cipher entirely independently so I have to
> have a solution that works with the AES-GCM based AEADs that are already
> part of the standard. But I will read these papers closely, because I do
> think the security notions are very similar to what I’m trying to achieve.
>
> — Neil
>
> On 28 Apr 2020, at 16:14, Paul Grubbs <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> I think you can get away without the additional hash of the ciphertext
> entirely if you use a compactly committing AEAD (ccAE) scheme [1]. A ccAE
> has a two-part ciphertext C = (C1, C2) with the property that C2 is a
> binding commitment to the plaintext and key. At least intuitively, then,
> using C2 in the KDF prevents a receiver from modifying the message. (This
> is morally similar to including the MAC tag in the KDF, as suggested, but
> sidesteps questions about MAC security and may be faster if optimal-rate
> schemes like HFC [2] are used.) I haven't analyzed this construction
> formally, though, so take this advice with a bit of salt.
>
>
> [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/664
> [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/016.pdf
>
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 8:30 AM Neil Madden <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks, section 5 of the eprint is very useful. In that you discuss the
>> solution of including the MAC tag in the KDF and you say that this requires
>> collision resistance of the MAC, where I had previously assumed only 2nd
>> preimage resistance would be enough. As I understand it, the potential
>> attack is that if Charlie has access to an Alice-oracle by which he can get
>> Alice to authenticate arbitrary messages to himself and Bob then he can use
>> this to perform a collision search to find two messages with the same MAC
>> tag (if the MAC is not collision resistant).
>>
>> I think this active attack would also apply to my proposed solution using
>> a hash of the authenticated ciphertext as input to the KDF. So my assertion
>> that 2nd preimage is enough is only valid for passive attacks, and full
>> collision resistance would be needed in general. That also means that if I
>> do pick SHA-256 to be consistent with existing use in JOSE then the
>> security against such attacks would be limited to ~128 bit level. Perhaps
>> that’s an incentive for me to also change the KDF in the scheme from JOSE’s
>> existing Concat-KDF to HKDF with SHA-512.
>>
>> I think the same attack would also apply to saltpack [1], if I understand
>> correctly? In saltpack a per-recipient MAC is calculated over a SHA-512 of
>> the ciphertext.
>>
>> [1] https://saltpack.org/encryption-format-v2 (scroll down to Payload
>> Packets)
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Neil
>>
>> On 27 Apr 2020, at 16:19, Dan Brown <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Neil,
>> I too have encountered this interesting and well-known (perhaps not
>> widely-known) problem.
>> See https://eprint.iacr.org/2005/056.pdf. (Section 5).
>> See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3278#section-4.1.2 the very short
>> “note”.
>>
>> I forget the details of the various claimed past solutions, but will try
>> to remember, maybe in a couple weeks.  Meanwhile, since the problem is
>> fresh in your mind, and you might try to make sense the couple of old
>> suggestions above, though I expect your knowledge has already advance past
>> this old stuff.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Dan
>>
>> *From:* Cfrg <[e-mail]> *On Behalf Of *Neil Madden
>> *Sent:* Monday, April 27, 2020 10:12 AM
>> *To:* CFRG <[e-mail]>
>> *Subject:* [Cfrg] Multi-recipient public key authenticated encryption
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am working on an enhancement to the JOSE standards and would like
>> feedback from members of CFRG about solutions to a particular issue if any
>> of you have time.
>>
>> In JOSE currently if you wish to create a message that has both
>> confidentiality and sender authentication using public key cryptography
>> then the only option is to both sign and then encrypt the message. This is
>> expensive because it involves multiple passes over the message and results
>> in a very bulky nested message structure with two layers of base64-encoding.
>>
>> Given that many uses of this sign-then-encrypt pattern do not require the
>> strong security properties of signatures, I have proposed [1] a public key
>> authenticated encryption mode based on NIST’s one-pass unified model from
>> SP 800-56A. This avoids the nested structure and means that you don’t need
>> multiple cryptographic primitives. The proposed algorithm uses two ECDH key
>> agreements: one between the sender’s ephemeral private key and the
>> recipient’s long-term public key; and a second between the two parties’
>> long term keys. The two shared secrets are concatenated and passed through
>> a KDF along with some context arguments. For a single recipient this
>> achieves sender authentication (subject to replay), and the single
>> recipient case is what I am primarily concerned about.
>>
>> (If you squint this is also roughly similar to the Noise framework “K”
>> one-way pattern, but my hands are waving quite a lot here).
>>
>> To support multiple recipients I copied the existing pattern used in
>> JOSE’s ECDH-ES+A256KW algorithm family in which the message is encrypted
>> using a random Content Encryption Key (CEK) and then the CEK is encrypted
>> for each recipient using AES-KeyWrap with the ECDH-derived key. As I then
>> mention in the security considerations this leads to any recipient being
>> able to produce a forgery using that CEK and claim it came from the
>> original sender:
>>
>>
>>    When Key Agreement with Key Wrapping is used, with the same Content
>>
>>    Encryption Key (CEK) reused for multiple recipients, any of those
>>
>>    recipients can produce a new message that appears to come from the
>>
>>    original sender.  The new message will be indistinguishable from a
>>
>>    genuine message from the original sender to any of the other
>>
>>    participants.  To avoid this attack, the content SHOULD be encrypted
>>
>>    separately to each recipient with a unique CEK or a nested signature
>>
>>    over the content SHOULD be used.
>>
>>
>> Because I am primarily interested in single-recipient use cases, this
>> seemed like an acceptable trade-off. However, I have since been contacted
>> by people who would like to use this draft for multi-recipient messages and
>> would not like to fall back on a nested signature structure.
>>
>> An initial proposal was to solve this by simply including the MAC tag
>> from the content encryption in either the per-recipient payload (encrypted
>> using AES-KeyWrap) or as an additional context field to the KDF. But the
>> MAC is computed using the CEK that is known to all recipients, so for this
>> to be secure would require second preimage resistance of the MAC with a
>> known key, which cannot be guaranteed for JOSE because it supports content
>> encryption using AES-GCM for which second preimages can be trivially
>> computed if you know the key.
>>
>> Assuming that a per-recipient MAC is too much overhead, an alternative
>> would be to include a collision-resistant hash of entire ciphertext (and IV
>> and associated data) in the KDF. This is unfortunate as it requires another
>> pass over the entire message when we’ve already encrypted and MACed, but it
>> appears to be a solution and at least is no more inefficient than the
>> original signed-then-encrypted approach which also needs to hash the entire
>> message.
>>
>> So two questions:
>>
>> 1. Is including a hash (e.g., SHA-512) of the ciphertext (assuming
>> symmetric AE) in the per-recipient KDF calculation sufficient to prevent
>> forgeries in the multi-recipient setting?
>>
>> 2. Are there more efficient alternatives that don’t assume 2nd preimage
>> resistance of the underlying symmetric MAC?
>>
>> [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-madden-jose-ecdh-1pu-03
>> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__tools.ietf.org_html_draft-2Dmadden-2Djose-2Decdh-2D1pu-2D03&d=DwMFaQ&c=yzoHOc_ZK-sxl-kfGNSEvlJYanssXN3q-lhj0sp26wE&r=mf6j6fOClApRsArWE9wqI1rEGUVkfxZ0aXWmn35nK_c&m=pABr2aBl1c_ofW8vypgq6rz4tGVZWkxu0IU_RSNb_L4&s=E_agQvNgeBlLsyPF6xyJ1TFQLBAJsGTY1FJf7EK3iqs&e=>
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Neil Madden
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