Re: [homenet] Securing HNCP - comments?

[Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]>]

>> Powerline Ethernet devices have built in encryption,

> Same thing with WPA* too of course. So I’m very tempted to assume L2
> takes care of security.. ;)

Guest networks?

However, I think it is premature to define a secure variant of HNCP before
we have some operational experience with the protocol.  It's only after
we've played with it for some time that will we get a feel for what are
reasonable and unreasonable operations to perform.

> just use e.g. IPsec with manual keying

Vulnerable to replay if done naively.  Not sure about the configuration
protocol, but definitely an issue for a routing protocol -- just capture
a default route announcement with a low metric, and you've won.

> [S4-3] HNCP-level PSK shared among all routers. Same bootstrap issues as
> [S4-2], may be able to get rid of manually keyed IPsec dependency.

It appears that you are only looking at hop-to-hop security.

I'm speaking off the top of my head here, so I'm probably saying something
stupid.  What about end-to-end solutions, where only routers with
a trusted key can originate configuration information?  This could perhaps
be combined with a leap-of-faith model (a la ssh).

> Looking at Babel, the routing protocol spec is 45 pages, and draft
> specification of HMAC security scheme for it is 55 pages.

Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we had a common layer 3 security protocol?
(We would make sure that it's actually usable before standardisation, of
course.)

-- Juliusz