Re: [tcpinc] Eric Rescorla's Discuss on draft-ietf-tcpinc-tcpcrypt-09: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Kyle Rose <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 10:09 AM, Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 9:56 AM, Kyle Rose <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> What is the situation, commonly the case for HTTP, in which different
>>
>> users would be using the same key for encryption?
>
>
> That's not the assumption. It's a time-space tradeoff. Say you have a
> 128-bit
> key. The attacker computes the value:
>
>   Encrypt(K, "GET / HTTP/1.1") [or whatever]
>
> For a feasible subset of the key space (e.g., 2^80 or so). It then captures
> a large fraction of the traffic on the Internet and looks for matches for
> one
> of these strings. If it has a match, it now immediately knows the key. Given
> the amount of traffic on the Internet, this is just maybe barely feasible
> with
> 128-bit keys. However, with a randomized (secret) nonce, it becomes
> infeasible.

Interesting. I don't have a strong opinion about this one, but if
there are no (or cheap) tradeoffs, it seems reasonable to use this
construction.

>> I'm confused. The byte stream will be delivered in-order via TCP
>> sequence semantics, so receiving frames (TLV within the TCP
>> bytestream) out-of-order should not be possible. If a MitM reordered
>> the frames, the receiver would either drop the frame or close the
>> connection following a failure to authenticate upon decryption:
>>
>> q( In the latter case, the implementation MUST
>>    either drop the TCP segment(s) containing the frame or abort the
>>    connection; but if it aborts, the implementation MUST raise an error
>>    condition distinct from the end-of-file condition. )
>
>
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding tcpcrypt, so let me ask a preliminary
> question:
>
> Say you have two TCP segments protected using tcpcrypt, N and N+1
> If the receiver receives N+1 before N, how does it behave?

Tcpcrypt lives entirely within the ordered TCP data stream. If N+1
arrives before N, that payload will not be delivered to the tcpcrypt
engine until after N arrives, in accordance with the in-order
semantics of TCP payload delivery.

>> The idea of doing something more ticket-like was discussed, but David
>> pointed out (in the thread here:
>> https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpinc/current/msg00919.html)
>> that tickets might not meet the charter mandate for forward secrecy. I
>> don't recall discussing the implications of mismanaging ss[i], but
>> I'll defer to Daniel on that point. Same goes for the following:
>
>
> I don't think the issue here is tickets, but rather the lack of a nonce.
> The point is that (say) the implementation fails to properly delete
> ss[i] after encrypting some data. Then if an attacker can force
> you to reuse ss[i], it can potentially recover data. This would not
> be the case if you mixed in a nonce from both sides (the way that
> TLS and IKE do).

I like the idea of added defense-in-depth against faulty
implementations, but it's not clear to me what tradeoffs this involves
re: (e.g.) SYN data on resumption, or on number of round trips, or on
the latency-to-first-payload-byte. I'd like Daniel to chime in here.

Kyle