Re: [TLS] Encrypting record headers: practical for TLS 1.3 after all?

[Jacob Appelbaum <[e-mail]>]

On 12/1/15, Yoav Nir <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> On 1 Dec 2015, at 3:36 AM, Jacob Appelbaum <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> On 12/1/15, Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 10:34:27AM +0000, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>>>
>>>> Bryan A Ford <[e-mail]> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> It would work just as well and in exactly the same way if the AEAD is
>>>>> replaced with the traditional Encrypt-then-MAC construction, for
>>>>> example.
>>>>
>>>> No it wouldn't, unless the encrypt part is a stream cipher.  You're
>>>> still
>>>> locked into using an AEAD stream cipher or the equivalent of an AEAD
>>>> stream
>>>> cipher built with encrypt+MAC.  It won't work with, for example, the
>>>> OCB
>>>> AEAD
>>>> mode, or CBC + MAC.
>>>
>>> I think we should focus on what would get TLS 1.3 to be adopted:
>>>
>>>    * Reasonably implementable in libraries that support older
>>>      versions alongside TLS 1.3.
>>>
>>
>> That doesn't change with Bryan's suggestion, I think.
>>
>>>    * Interoperable in the field with various capital-intensive
>>>      middle boxen.
>>
>> Which would those be? And what is the definition of capital-intensive
>> for those watching on the sidelines?
>
> Firewall, IPS/IDS devices. Boxes that attempt to perform sanity-check on
> protocols to make sure that the stuff going over TCP port 443 is really
> HTTPS rather than an attempt at tunneling.  There are some attacks such the
> the code that protects against them needs to follow TLS record sizes. For
> the most part these are not-so-interesting attacks, causing certain versions
> of certain browsers to hang, and they are expensive for the firewall to
> protect against, so for the most part these protections are turned off. But
> it’s not everywhere.

Could you be more specific? Which devices are we saying will break? Do
you have model numbers? Are those vendors on this list? Do they agree
that this will break and do we agree that they are a relevant
stakeholder who has a user's security in mind?

For example, do we really care what sandvine or xkeyscore or narus or
similar vendors think? I think the answer is no. They're still going
to do extremely powerful traffic analysis and the more information TLS
leaks, the more they will use it to degrade the security of TLS for
all users. It may be that they will be full, on path, attackers and
yes, in some cases, they can do different more powerful attacks.
Again, we should treat that as a negative thing and make it as hard as
is possible.

>
> If enough middleboxes block TLS 1.3, the browsers will implement a downgrade
> dance. If they do that, attackers will be able to exploit the downgrade
> dance. I don’t think the net effect is better security. We’d be far better
> off writing a separate document on how to use the padding feature that is
> already in 1.3 to mitigate traffic analysis without actually flooding your
> Internet connection. Splitting records and padding a few can be more
> effective than masking the length bits.

Censors are going to perform surveillance and then censor; TLS 1.3
should treat surveillance as a security issue and censorship as an
attack. It may be that we can't stop certain kinds of on path attacks
but man on the side seems nearly entirely do-able. I mean aside from
the TCP reset issues do to layer violation concerns. At least we'll
have DTLS, which won't suffer from such a trivial denial of service...
right?

All the best,
Jacob