Re: Packet Number Encryption outside of AEAD

[Kazuho Oku <[e-mail]>]

2018-07-28 7:11 GMT+09:00 Deval, Manasi <[e-mail]>:
> About the issue of Packet Number Encryption outside of AEAD - We agree it simplifies both hardware and software logic. It also allows the2 encryption operations to run mostly in parallel, so it is a welcome modification.

Would you mind elaborating a bit on how the proposed change would help
parallelization?

My understanding is that it does not help parallelizing "encryption",
because the only change is if you have the cleartext PN (which is
something you can prepare beforehand) as part of the AAD.

I also do not understand how it helps parallelizing decryption in practice.

The proposed change removes cleartext PN from AAD. It sounds like that
you would then have a chance to start processing AAD for GCM. But I am
not sure if that is correct.

In the current approach, input to GCM is: GCM(first-octet || CID ||
plaintext-PN || payload).

With the proposed change, it becomes: GCM(fist-octet || CID || payload).

Because where the payload begins depends on the value of the PN being
decrypted, in both cases you have the same degree of parallelism. You
can process GCM to the end of CID, but no more.

To conclude, I do not see how the proposed change helps parallelize
the encoder or the decoder.

> Thanks,
> Manasi
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: QUIC [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Christian Huitema
> Sent: Friday, July 27, 2018 6:43 AM
> To: Kazuho Oku <[e-mail]>; Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen <[e-mail]>
> Cc: IETF QUIC WG <[e-mail]>
> Subject: Re: Packet Number Encryption outside of AEAD
>
>
>
> On 7/26/2018 9:14 PM, Kazuho Oku wrote:
>> Consider the case where a sender encodes a packet number using 4
>> octets even when just using 1 octet is enough.
>>
>> An on-path attacker rewrites the packet by applying XOR 0x80 to the
>> first octet of the encrypted PN, and trimming the latter three octets
>> of the encrypted PN.
> That attack does not work, because the encoding of the PN is big-endian.
> The actual packet number is in the fourth octet. Or rather, it only
> works in the special case where the PN is 0.
>
> -- Christian Huitema
>



-- 
Kazuho Oku