Re: [TLS] Data volume limits

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Blumenthal, Uri - 0553 - MITLL
<uri@ll.mit.edu> wrote:
> OK, let me try an extremely naïve approach.
>
> Say, an adversary observes a ton of TLS traffic between A and B. Using
> approach that Watson and others outlined, he can now tell that this is not a
> truly random stream but a bunch of encrypted data. My question is, from
> practical real-world point of view - so what? (Of course, beyond the ability
> to publish a real paper that IND-* has been compromised :)
>
> If there are practical consequences, like loss of confidentiality – I’m
> dying to hear the outline of a practical attack.

The problem is that people design systems assuming something like
indistinguishability. And so when you violate that assumption, all
bets are off.

What is the actual problem with either implementing rekeying, or
limiting data to something like 128 GByte per connection?
> --
> Regards,
> Uri Blumenthal
>
> From: TLS <tls-bounces@ietf.org> on behalf of "Dang, Quynh"
> <quynh.dang@nist.gov>
> Date: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 at 07:21
> To: Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>, "tls@ietf.org" <tls@ietf.org>
>
> Subject: Re: [TLS] Data volume limits
>
> Hi Eric,
>
>
> I explained the issue before and some other people recently explained it
> again on this thread. AES has 128-bit block. Therefore, when there are 2^64
> or more ciphertext blocks, there are likely collisions among the ciphertext
> blocks (the collision probability increases rapidly when the number of
> ciphertext blocks increases above 2^64 ( 2^n/2 in generic term) ).
>
>
> However, the only information the attacker can gain from ANY pair of
> collided ciphertext blocks is that their corresponding plaintext blocks are
> probably different ones because the chance for them to be the same is
> 1/2^128 (1/2^n in generic term) and this is NOT better than a random guess.
> So, you don't lose anything actually.
>
>
> As a pseudorandom function, AES completely fails under any mode when the
> number of ciphertext blocks gets above 2^64.  When the counter is
> effectively only 64 bits (instead of 96 bits as in TLS 1.3), the data
> complexity should be below 2^32 blocks because the same input block and the
> same key can be repeated 2^32 times to find a collision in the ciphertext
> blocks.  If you want a negligible collision probability, the number of data
> blocks should be way below 2^32 in this situation.
>
>
> However, the confidentiality of the plaintext blocks is not lost at all as
> long as the counter number does not repeat.
>
>
> Quynh.
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: TLS <tls-bounces@ietf.org> on behalf of Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 6:17 AM
> To: Simon Josefsson
> Cc: tls@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: [TLS] Data volume limits
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 12:44 AM, Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com> writes:
>>
>> > Watson kindly prepared some text that described the limits on what's
>> > safe
>> > for AES-GCM and restricting all algorithms with TLS 1.3 to that lower
>> > limit (2^{36} bytes), even though ChaCha doesn't have the same
>> > restriction.
>>
>> Can we see a brief writeup explaining the 2^36 number?
>
>
> I believe Watson provided one a while back at:
> https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg18240.html
>
>>
>> I don't like re-keying.  It is usually a sign that your primitives are
>> too weak and you are attempting to hide that fact.  To me, it is similar
>> to discard the first X byte of RC4 output.
>
>
> To be clear: I would prefer not to rekey either, but the consensus at IETF
> Yokohama
> was that we were close enough to the limit that we probably had to. Would be
> happy to learn that we didn't.
>
> -Ekr
>
>
>
>> If AES-GCM cannot provide confidentiality beyond 64GB (which would
>> surprise me somewhat), I believe we ought to be careful about
>> recommending it.
>>
>> Of course, the devil is in the details: if the risk is that the secret
>> key is leaked, that's fatal; if the risk is that the attacker can tell
>> whether two particular plaintext 128 byte blocks are the same or not in
>> the entire file, that can be a risk we can live with (similar to the
>> discard X bytes of RC4 fix).
>>
>> I believe 64GB is within the range that people download in a web browser
>> these days.  More data intensive longer-running protocols often transfer
>> significantly more.
>>
>> /Simon
>
>
>
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--Rousseau.