Re: [kitten] draft-ietf-kitten-rfc4402bis-00

[Shawn M Emery <[e-mail]>]

On 02/17/15 08:40 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 8:43 PM, Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> On Mon, 16 Feb 2015, Shawn M Emery wrote:
>>> Thanks for your review, comments in-line...
>>> On 02/13/15 11:16 AM, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
>>>
>>>> The original RFC 4402 security considerations include:
>>>>
>>>>      [...] if an
>>>>      application can be tricked into providing very large input octet
>>>>      strings and requesting very long output octet strings, then that may
>>>>      constitute a denial of service attack on the application; therefore,
>>>>      applications SHOULD place appropriate limits on the size of any input
>>>>      octet strings received from their peers without integrity protection.
>>>>
>>>> It is not clear to me that integrity protection is sufficient to alleviate
>>>> the denial of service attack, since verifying the message integrity may
>>>> itself consume a substantial amount of resources.
>>> I interpret this statement differently:
>>>
>>>      If integrity protection is not enforced then an attacker can construct an
>>> arbitrarily long string.
>>
>> Woudln't the attacker be able to do that without needing a very large
>> input string, though?  I guess the claims it that each individual
>> pseudo-random() call is more expensive on a long input, so your
>> interpretation is still plausible.
> I think the original was about use of the PRF to bind something like,
> say, a TLS handshake.  Now suppose you send such messages that are
> very large prior to completing authentication.
>
> Anyways, it's not a realistic problem.  I think that was stretching to
> cover what in retrospect strikes me as a non-issue.

If this is the case then I think this problem is really outside the 
scope of the specification and in general applications would be 
susceptible to such DoS attacks.  I believe the consensus in the WG is 
that this sentence be elided from the bis draft.  I will make the 
necessary update if so.  BTW, I should probably move myself as an editor 
of the draft.

Shawn.
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