Re: [TLS] Question to TLS 1.3 and certificate revocation checks in long lasting connections

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

Nico raised some really good points here.

I think it is useful to start with the problem description.

It seems that you are concerned that there is a possibility for leakage or compromise of keying material during the lifetime of the session.
What could happen?

* Long-term keys*,
* Some keys used in the key hierarchy,
* keys used for protecting the application traffic

Additionally, you could also consider the case that the trust anchor store gets compromised.

In any case, you seem to be concerned about the leakage of long-term keys (at least that's what I get from the email thread).

If your long-term keys got compromised then you have a serious problem. Re-running even the full handshake will not indicate problem. It will just work fine.

You will somehow have to find out that these long-term keys have been leaked, which will not be easy. Then, you need to isolate the endpoints using those compromised keys and reprovision new keys to them. You might want to terminate ongoing connections as well. Since you will often not know what exactly has been compromised (at least not quickly enough), you might need to take a range of steps to re-set it to a known good state (such as doing a firmware update, in case of an IoT device).

Many of these aspects are, however, outside the scope of TLS itself.

Could you elaborate on the threats you are trying to address?

Ciao
Hannes

*: Often a device has more than one long-term key pair (used for different purposes). Without further complicating things, the impact depend a bit on which keys have been leaked.

-----Original Message-----
From: TLS <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Nico Williams
Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 8:35 PM
To: John Mattsson <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [TLS] Question to TLS 1.3 and certificate revocation checks in long lasting connections

On Fri, Mar 05, 2021 at 06:42:40PM +0000, John Mattsson wrote:
> >While renegotiation will never be re-added, there is post-handshake
> >authentication (RFC 8446, section 4.6.2), and while that is currently
> >about authenticating the _client_ to the server, it should be trivial
> >to extend the protocol to support re-authenticating the server to the
> >client as well.
>
> I think the current Post-Handshake authentication is not really
> suitable for long-term connections. It assures that the other party is
> still alive but it does not shut out any other third parties with
> access to application_traffic_secret_N. Such parties may have gotten
> the key with or without collaboration with one of the nodes.

We assume local security, so the only way the TLS keys could have leaked to third parties is if either a) the local security assumption fails, in which case you have bigger problems, or b) the cryptographic security of TLS itself failed, in which case you have bigger problems, or c) you're exceeding usage limits on a symmetric cipher.

Changing session keys wouldn't help you in cases (a) or (b).

I think the only interesting case is (c).  If you're using a 128-bit block cipher, you're not in case (c) as you'd have to transfer something like 2PB before you exceed AES key usage limits.

At some point you have to be prepared to reconnect.  Application protocols that work like BGP (destroy the world on RST) simply need to be fixed to not do that.

> Agree that the negotiation part of renegotiation should not come back.
> Below is a sketch of what I think would be needed Post-Handshake for

That's essentially renego-lite.  Note that there's protocol timing trickiness in getting this right.  SSHv2, which does have proper re-keying, has experience with that.

> DTLS/SCTP with DTLS 1.3:

What's special about DTLS vs. TLS?  Why should one get this but not the other?

Nico
--

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