Re: [TLS] Consensus for AEAD IV

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On Apr 26, 2015, at 6:21 AM, Michael StJohns <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 4/24/2015 4:44 PM, Joseph Salowey wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Martin Thomson <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>> On 24 April 2015 at 10:10, Joseph Salowey <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>> > The general consensus on the list seems to prefer to derive "IV" and use it
>> > to make the AEAD nonce less predictable. Most folks seemed to be OK with
>> > this approach.    In Dallas, there was significant support for using the
>> > derived "IV" as a per session XOR mask for the counter.  If you have
>> > objections to this approach please respond on the list by May 1, 2015 .
>> 
>> 
>> You aren't being particularly precise about the process here.
>> 
>> I believe that these were the two options that were most debated:
>> 
>> a)  nonce = zeroes(N_MIN) XOR counter
>> b)  nonce = HKDF(...., N_MIN) XOR counter
>> 
>> Did you mean the latter option?
>> 
>> [Joe] Yes, the later where the quantity XORed with the counter is derived during the handshake.  
> 
> In general, APIs for hardware (and software) encryption are set up as init, multiple updates and finalize.  The arguments to init are generally a handle pointing to the key, a selection of the encryption mode and the initialization parameters specific to that mode.  The initialization parameters generally include material for the IV (obviously not used in ECB), and other mode specific items.  For CCM, most implementations use the block formatting function described in appendix A of the NIST spec and that function uses as input to the initialization a "nonce" as well as information about the length of the AAD.
> 
> All of the Init data is non-secret information (note that I said handle to key, and not key above - the handle is non-secret, the key material is secret) and must be shared implicitly or explicitly between sender and receiver.
> 
> All of that is a long way of saying that making the nonce be some sort of output of the HKDF is probably a bad idea as the general use for a KDF is to produce secret key material.
> 
> 
> A zero session nonce combined with the message sequence number to form unique per-key value is acceptable cryptographically - at least for GCM and CCM.    (and that's really the same thing as 0 XOR counter as far as I can tell).
> 
> 
> A randomly generated session nonce concatenated with the message sequence number to produce a message nonce is acceptable cryptographically and provides no less protection than generating a long session nonce and xor'ing the sequence number in to produce the message nonce. 
> 
> AFAICT b) provides no additional security over a).   The security of CCM and GCM is NOT dependent on the secrecy of the IV/Nonce/sequence number, only in its uniqueness for a given key, and (b) appears to be trying to make the IV secret.
> 
> Doing (b) will make it difficult to implement TLS using generic HSM functions as there will probably need to be some way of piping the secret output of HKDF to be the per message IV.

I don’t see why. Make the 128- or 256-bit key one part of the keying material, and the 96-bit quantity another part of the keying material. A single handle references a structure containing both.

Now you pass the encryption function the handle, the data to be encrypted (and protected) and a message counter. The function (hardware or software) converts the counter into a nonce by XOR-ing with the quantity, and proceeds from there. There is no reason not to treat the 96-bit quantity as anything but secret.

Doesn’t this solve you API issue?

Yoav