Re: [OAUTH-WG] WGLC on draft-ietf-oauth-mtls-07

[Neil Madden <[e-mail]>]

Responses inline again.

On Mon, 30 Apr 2018 at 19:44, John Bradley <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Inline.
>
>
> On Apr 30, 2018, at 12:57 PM, Neil Madden <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
> Hi John,
>
> On 30 Apr 2018, at 15:07, John Bradley <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> I lean towards letting new certificate thumbprints be defined someplace
> else.
>
> With SHA256, it is really second preimage resistance that we care about
> for a certificate thumbprint, rather than simple collision resistance.
>
>
> That’s not true if you consider a malicious client. If I can find any pair
> of certificates c1 and c2 such that SHA256(c1) == SHA256(c2) then I can
> present c1 to the AS when I request an access token and later present c2 to
> the protected resource when I use it. I don’t know if there is an actual
> practical attack based on this, but a successful attack would violate the
> security goal implied by the draft: that that requests made to the
> protected resource "MUST be made […] using the same certificate that was
> used for mutual TLS at the token endpoint.”
>
> NB: this is obviously easier if the client gets to choose its own
> client_id, as it can find the colliding certificates and then sign up with
> whatever subject ended up in c1.
>
>
> Both C1 and C2 need to be valid certificates, so not just any collision
> will do.
>

That doesn’t help much. There’s still enough you can vary in a certificate
to generate collisions.

If the client produces C1 and C2 and has the private keys for them, I have
> a hard time seeing what advantage it could get by having colliding
> certificate hashes.
>

Me too. But if the security goal is proof of possession, then this attack
(assuming practical collisions) would break that goal.


> If the AS is trusting a CA, the attacker producing a certificate that
> matches the hash of another certificate so that it seems like the fake
> certificate was issued by the CA, is an attack that worked on MD5 given
> some predictability.  That is why we now have entropy requirements for
> certificate serial numbers, that reduce known prefix attacks.
>

The draft allows for self-signed certificates.

Second-preimage Resistance is being computationaly infusible to find a
> second preimage that has the same output as the first preimage.   The
> second preimage strength for SHA256 is 201-256bits and collision resistance
> strength is 128 bits.  See Appendix A of
> https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-107r1.pdf if
> you want to understand the relationship between message length and second
> Preimage resistance.
>
> RFC 4270 is old but still has some relevant info.
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4270
>
> Think of the confirmation method as the out of band integrity check for
> the certificate that is presented in the TLS session.
>

This is all largely irrelevant.

MD5 failed quite badly with chosen prefix collision attacks against
> certificates (Thanks to some X.509 extensions).
> SHA1 has also been shown to be vulnerable to a PDF chosen prefix attack (
> http://shattered.io)
>
> The reason NIST pushed for development of SHA3 was concern that a preimage
> attack might eventually be found agains the SHA2 family of hash algorithms.
>
> While SHA512 may have double the number of bytes it may not help much
> against a SHA2 preimage attack,. (Some papers  suggest that the double word
> size of SHA512 it may be more vulnerable than SHA256 to some attacks)
>
>
> This is really something where the input of a cryptographer would be
> welcome. As far as I am aware, the collision resistance of SHA-256 is still
> considered at around the 128-bit level, while it is considered at around
> the 256-bit level for SHA-512. Absent a total break of SHA2, it is likely
> that SHA-512 will remain at a higher security level than SHA-256 even if
> both are weakened by cryptanalytic advances. They are based on the same
> algorithm, with different parameters and word/block sizes.
>
> SHA512 uses double words and more rounds, true.  It also has more rounds
> broken by known attacks than SHA256 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2..
> So it is slightly more complex than doubling the output size doubles the
> strength.
>

SHA-512 also has more rounds (80) than SHA-256 (64), so still has more
rounds left to go...


>
> It is currently believed that SHA256 has 256 bits of second preimage
> strength.   That could always turn out to be wrong as SHA2 has some
> similarities to SHA1, and yes post quantum that is reduced to 128bits.
>
> To have a safe future option we would probably want to go with SHA3-512.
>   However I don’t see that getting much traction in the near term.
>
>
> SHA3 is also slower than SHA2 in software.
>
> Yes roughly half the speed in software but generally faster in hardware.
>
> I am not necessarily arguing for SHA3, rather I think this issue is larger
> than this spec and selecting alternate hashing algorithms for security
> should be separate from this spec.
>
> I am for agility, but I don’t want to accidentally have people doing
> something that is just theatre.
>
> Rotating certificates, and having the lifetime of a certificates validity
> is as useful as doubling the hash size.
>

Why not allow both?


> I don’t think the confirmation hash length is the weakest link.
>

Shouldn’t we allow all the parts to be as strong as possible?


> John B.
>
>
>
> Practical things people should do run more along the lines of:
> 1: Put at least 64 bits of entropy into the certificate serial number if
> using self signed or a local CA.  Commercial CA need to do that now.
> 2: Rotate certificates on a regular basis,  using a registered JWKS URI
>
> My concern is that people will see a bigger number and decide it is better
> if we define it in the spec.
> We may be getting people to do additional work and increasing token size
> without a good reason by putting it in the spec directly.
>
>
> I’m not sure why this is a concern. As previously pointed out, SHA-512 is
> often *faster* than SHA-256, and an extra 32 bytes doesn’t seem worth
> worrying about.
>
> [snip]
>
> — Neil
>
> — Neil
>