Re: [TLS] Possible timing attack on TLS 1.3 padding mechanism

[David Benjamin <[e-mail]>]

The data ultimately needs to be returned to the calling application,
presumably some HTTP parser, which in turn passes data up to more calling
code and so on. Conversely, the data must have been produced by some also
application-level process on the sender, some HTTP serializer, before it
was handed off to TLS at all. All of that work is going to freely branch on
the length. (Indeed even the traditional read/write APIs of most TLS
libraries are the wrong shape here.) Patching just the unpad corner is not
very useful without a clearer story for the rest.

I'd actually suggest that, for cases where the length needs to remain
impervious to timing leaks end-to-end, TLS is the wrong layer to pad.
Writing a fully general HTTP parser which avoids leaking the padding length
across arbitrary record boundaries not under your control sounds
implausible. You'd have to account for padding potentially between *every
byte* at the lowest-level serialization.

Rather, the higher up the stack you insert your padding, the fewer layers
you must traverse. If the process is designed to treat some length as
secret in the first place, it probably has the "padding" built-in. E.g., EC
private keys are serialized and (at least in good implementations)
represented in memory as fixed-width, bounded only by the curve order, even
though an individual private key might happen to have a leading zero byte
or so.

David

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 4:53 PM Paterson, Kenny <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been analysing the record protocol spec for TLS 1.3 a bit,
> specifically the new padding mechanism. I think there's a possible timing
> attack on a naïve implementation of de-padding. Maybe this is already known
> to people who've been paying more attention than me!
>
> Recall that the padding mechanism permits an arbitrary number of 00 bytes
> to be added after the plaintext and content type byte, up to the max record
> size. This data is then encrypted using whichever AEAD scheme is specified
> in the cipher suite. This padding scheme is quite important for TLS 1.3
> because the current AEAD schemes do leak the length of record plaintexts.
> There should be no padding oracle style attack possible because of the
> integrity guarantees of the AEAD schemes in use.
>
> The idea for the timing attack is as follows.
>
> The natural way to depad (after AEAD decryption) is to remove the 00 bytes
> at the end of the plaintext structure one by one, until a non-00 byte is
> encountered. This is then the content type byte. Notice that the amount of
> time needed to execute this depadding routine would be proportional to the
> number of padding bytes. If there's some kind of response record for this
> record, then measuring the time taken from reception of the target record
> to the appearance of the response record can be used to infer information
> about the amount of padding, and thereby, the true length of the plaintext
> (since the length of the padded plaintext is known from the ciphertext
> length).
>
> The timing differences here would be small. But they could be amplified by
> various techniques. For example, the cumulative timing difference over many
> records could allow leakage of the sum of the true plaintext lengths. Think
> of a client browser fetching a simple webpage from a browser. The page is
> split over many TLS records, each of which is individually padded, with the
> next GET request from the client being the "response record". (This is a
> pretty simplistic view of how a web browser works, I know!). The total
> timing difference might then be sufficient for webpage fingerprinting, for
> example.
>
> I'm not claiming this is a big issue, but maybe something worth thinking
> about and addressing in the TLS 1.3 spec.
>
> There's at least a couple of ways to avoid the problem:
>
> 1. Do constant-time depadding - by examining every byte in the plaintext
> structure even after the first non-00 byte is encountered.
> 2. Add an explicit padding length field at the end of the plaintext
> structure, and removing padding without checking its contents. (This should
> be safe because of the AEAD integrity guarantees.)
>
> Option 2 is probably a bit invasive at this late stage in the
> specification process. Maybe a sentence or two on option 1 could be added
> to the spec.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kenny
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> TLS mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls
>