Re: [MLS] All commits = external commit?

I second that assessment, my idea behind External Commits was to offer a mechanism where internal Commits couldn’t be used. External Commits should remain optional (this can easily be achieved by not providing the ExternalCommitInfo package to new members) and when they are used they should be used as a last resort mechanism (meaning there really is no way to add a member with an internal Commit).

I also think MLS should should remain in the position to cover most scenarios from mainstream consumer messaging to messaging in high security environments. External Commits make the former much more accessible but shouldn’t jeopardise the latter.

Raphael

> On 6 Oct 2020, at 18:38, Joel Alwen <jalwen@wickr.com> wrote:
> 
> Hey people,
> 
> To follow up on the discussion at the end of the Interim about whether to use
> the new "asymmetric external commit" (AEC) mechanism for internal commits I
> wanted to summarize my thoughts here. For brevity let SIC be our current
> "symmetric internal commit" mechanism.
> 
> - AEC requires extra asymmetric crypto operations (both for committer and
> receiver) compared to SIC which I think we should avoid if we can, even at the
> cost of some code complexity.
> 
> - AEC doesn't ensure the committer knows the old epoch's key schedule. This can
> play a deciding role in several types of attacks.
> 
> Consider this execution:
> 
> 1. Alice is in a group. Her state leaks (including her signining key).
> 2. Alice commits (to arbitrary propal).
> 
> At this point, the adversary can still forge a new AEC from Alice but not an SIC.
> 
> Worse, step 2 could have instead been "Alice sends an update proposal replacing
> her leaf HPKE but keeping the her sig keys (e.g. because new credentials are
> costly to come by). Someone commits to the new proposal." At this point I'd
> expect PCS to have kicked in for Alice (as it does when using SIC). But not for
> AECs since Alice's signing key is all thats needed to forge a new AEC.
> 
> I think it is not worth weakening security this way if we dont have to.
> (Especially, since in some deployments external commits may not be a supported
> feature at all.)
> 
> - As for what may or may not be displaid to users, that's really up to the
> implementation. IMO our goal should be to make the protocol as secure as we can
> subject to reasonable costs. Which aspects of the resulting security properties
> are ultimately communicated to users should, in principle, be left up to
> implementations. That means we shouldn't be designing away security features
> only because we think they might be hard to communicate. (Nor does it seem that
> inconceivable to me that some implementation may end up explicitly signaling
> whether a commit was external vs internal.)
> 
> - Joël
> 
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