[MLS] External Commits - Resync

["Hale, Britta (CIV)" <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

A good point was raised by Jonathon Hoyland during the MLS IETF 109 meeting regarding possible concerns in using external commits for resync, particularly in the case of Alice adding/removing herself. Richard noted that this is a feature in the case that Alice is no longer synchronized with the group and therefore can use an external commit to add herself back in, removing the previous version.

As opposed to any newcomer joining with an external commit, the case of Alice re-joining presents a potential security issue. Namely, as currently specified (in my reading of the draft), an existing group member, Bob, has no means to distinguish between the following cases:

  1.  Alice needs to resync and therefore performs an external commit and removes her prior version.
  2.  Alice’s signature keys are compromised (it is not necessary for the adversary to compromise any group state). The adversary performs an external commit in Alice’s name, and then removes her prior version and impersonates her to the group.


One might hope that Alice notices that she is removed and communicates this to the group members OOB, but it is also possible that that she assumes some other reason for the removal, is offline, or simply is not active enough to take action for a fairly long compromise window. Even if she tries to use an external commit to get back into the group and then removes the adversary-as-Alice, there is no means for other group members distinguish the real Alice from the adversary-as-Alice and the process could be circular (until new valid identity keys are issued).

While a newcomer is a fresh source to be trusted or not, Alice has been “healing” along with the group and the above option (2) allows the adversary to bypass all of that.

The source of the problem is that when Alice re-syncs, she is not providing any validation of being the same/previous identity, so it is easy for other group members to accept that nothing more than a resync has taken place. Thus, a fairly straightforward solution is to require PSK use in cases where an external commit is used for resync. By enabling a PSK derived from a previous epoch during which Alice was part of the group to be injected with the external commit, Alice provides some proof of prior group membership and we avoid the total reset.

What does everyone think about this? Is it a problem that we want to address, or let it fall out-of-scope?
(Also, if I missed something in the draft that already fixes this, please point it out.)

- Britta