Re: [TLS] comparison of draft-josefsson-salsa20-tls-02 and draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-02

Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com> Wed, 23 October 2013 15:44 UTC

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From: Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 08:42:30 -0700
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To: Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav@gnutls.org>
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Cc: "tls@ietf.org" <tls@ietf.org>, Joachim Strömbergson <joachim@secworks.se>
Subject: Re: [TLS] comparison of draft-josefsson-salsa20-tls-02 and draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-02
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On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 7:51 AM, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav@gnutls.org>wrote:

> as a general comment I think DTLS' resilience on forged packets
>  isn't that good. It makes it a perfect target to lay an attack. I think
> it would be much better to have a limit by default on the allowed
> packets with wrong MAC.


S 4.2.7 provides some guidance in this area, but it's pretty vague:

   Note that Alert messages are not retransmitted at all, even when they
   occur in the context of a handshake.  However, a DTLS implementation
   which would ordinarily issue an alert SHOULD generate a new alert
   message if the offending record is received again (e.g., as a
   retransmitted handshake message).  Implementations SHOULD detect when
   a peer is persistently sending bad messages and terminate the local
   connection state after such misbehavior is detected.

It certainly seems like it would be a good thing to document some
better guidance about how many bad MACs you should tolerate.

Do you have any thoughts about what makes sense?

-Ekr