Re: [openpgp] AEAD Chunk Size

[Peter Pentchev <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 01:23:07PM +0100, Vincent Breitmoser wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> a lot that Tobias is bringing up here resonates with me, I feel like we should
> be thinking more about the fully vs partially authenticated use cases, not just
> chunking on its own.
> 
> (As an aside, I'm not convinced the early integrity check should have much
> bearing on this discussion.  Transmission errors are (and should be) handled on
> other layers in mostly all cases, and noticing errors earlier than at the end of
> data that was going to be buffered anyways is not that big of a gain. In cases
> where this is a concern (like uh, tape drives?), a tool should be used that is
> actually meant for the job, e.g. par2)
> 
> Ideally, a receiver won't ever output unauthenticated plaintext, hence ideally
> all of the chunking discussions would be moot. What chunking brings to the table
> is to give the *sender* of a message the option to *allow* the *receiver* to
> emit partially authenticated plaintext, trading a truncation vulnerability for
> the ability to process data on a smaller buffer size than the entire plaintext.
> This is useful for $large amounts of data, or streamed workflows with unknown
> data sizes.
> 
> While following the discussion I've gone back and forth a couple of times
> between favoring the case for fully authenticated plaintext, or for supporting
> streamed workflows with fixed-size chunks (while sacrificing truncation). Both
> seem equally valid to me. However, I can't see a good use case for variable size
> chunking: it adds complexity to spec and implementations in particular on the
> receiving side, and pushes the onus on reasoning about chunk sizes to the
> implementations, which is basically impossible in the face of interoperability
> concerns.
> 
> I'd like to bring up a new proposal then: Support either no chunking, or
> fixed-size chunking. The advantage would be that the sender's position on
> authentication is made more explicit: If they don't do chunking, they expect the
> receiver to fully buffer and authenticate before processing, which could
> currently only be achieved implicitly via a large chunk size. If they use the
> fixed-size chunking, they explicitly offer the option to emit partially
> authenticated plaintext.

Not rejecting your idea outright, just curious how it would work with
e.g. instant messengers where there is streaming of irregularly-sized
packets coming at irregular intervals (and the users would expect that
Things Just Work(tm) for both two-character messages and five-megabyte
files sent over the wire).

G'luck,
Peter

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