Hey! I'm David, the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I'm a crypto engineer at O(1) Labs on the Mina cryptocurrency, previously I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.
After Real World Crypto, like every year, NCC Con follows next.
NCC Con is the NCC Group conference, a conference for its employees only, with a bunch of talks and drinks. I gave a talk on TLS 1.3 that I hope I can translate to a blog post at some point.
This year I also designed the NCC Group's Mascot! Which was given away as a T-shirt and a sticker to all the employees at the conference. It was a pretty surreal moment for me to see people around me, at the conference and in the casinos (it was in Vegas) wearing that shirt I designed :D
The first talk on Quantum Computers was really interesting, but unfortunately mostly went over my head. Although I'm glad we had a pro who could come and talk to us on the subject. The take away I took from it was to go read the SMBC comics on the same subject.
After that there was a talk about TPMs and DAA for Direct Anonymous Attestation. I should probably read the wikipedia page because I have no idea what that was about.
Helena Handschuh from Cryptography Research talked about DPA Resistance for Real People. There are many techniques we use as DPA countermeasures but it seems like we still don't have the secret sauce to completely prevent that kind of issues, so what we really end up doing is rotating the keys every 3 encryption/decryption operations or so... That's what they do at Rambus, and at least what I've heard other people doing when I was at CHES this year. Mike Hamburg describes the way they rotate keys in his STROBE project a bit. Handschuh also talked about the two ways to certify a DPA-resistant product. There are evaluations like Common Criteria, which is usually the normal route, but now there is also validation. Don't ask me about that.
David Cash then entered the stage and delivered what I believe was the best talk of the conference. He started with a great explanation of ORE vs OPE. OPE (Order Preserving Encryption) allows you to encrypt data in a way that ciphertexts conserve the same lexicographic order, ORE (Order Revealing Encryption) does not, but some function over the ciphertexts end up revealing the order of the plaintexts. So they're kind of the same in the end and the distiction doesn't seem to really matter for his attacks. What matters is the distinction between Ideal ORE and normal ORE (and the obviously, the latter is what is used in the real world).
Ideal ORE only reveals the order while the ORE schemes we use also reveal other things, for example the MSDB (most significant different bits) which is the position of the first non-similar bit between two plaintexts.
Previous research focused on attacking a single column of encrypted data while their new research attacks columns of correlated data. David gives the example of coordinates and shows several illustrations of his attack revealing an encrypted image of the linux penguin, encrypted locations on a map or his go-about saved and encrypted by a GPS. Just by looking at the order of coordinates everything can be visually somewhat restored.
Just by analyzing the MSDB property, a bunch of bits from the plaintexts can be restored as well. It seemed like very bad news for the ORE schemes analyzed.
Finally, two points that seemed really important in this race for the perfect ORE scheme is that first: the security proofs of these constructions are considering any database data as uniformly random, whereas we know that we rarely need to store completely random data :) Especially columns are often correlated with one another.
Second, even an (hypothetical) ideal ORE was vulnerable to their research and to previous research (he gave the example of encrypting the whole domain in which case the order would just reveal the plaintexts).
This is a pretty bad stab at ORE scheme in general, showing that it is intuitively limited.
Paul Grubbs followed with an explanation of BoPETS, a term that I believe he recently coined, meaning "Building on Property revealing EncrypTion". He gave a good list of products that I replicated below in a table.
They looked at Mylar and saw if they could break it from 3 different attacker setups: a snapshot setup (smash and grab attack), passive (attacker got in, and is now observing what is happening), active (attacker can do pretty much anything I believe).
Mylar uses some encrypted data blob/structure in addition to a "principal graph" containing some metadata, ACL, etc... related to the encrypted data. Grubbs showed how he could recover most of the plaintexts from all the different setups.
Tal Malkin interjected that these attacks would probably not apply to some different PPE systems like IBM OXT. Grubbs said it did not matter. Who's right, I don't know.
As for the active attacker problem, there seem to exist no intuitive solution there. If the attacker can do anything, you're probably screwed.
Raluca Ada Popa (Mylar) followed Grubbs by talking about her product Mylar and rejected all of Grubbs claims, saying that there were out of the scope of Mylar OR were attacking mis-use of the product. IIRC the same thing happened when CryptDB was "broken", CryptDB released a paper arguing that these were false claims.
After Mylar, Popa intend to release two new products with better security: Verena and Opaque.
David Mcgrew mentionned Joy and gave a long talk about detecting PRNG failures. Basically look for public values affected by a PRNG like signatures or the server/client random in TLS.
And that was it. See you next year.
If you have anything to say about my notes, the talks, or other people's notes, please do so in the comments :)
Trevor Perrin talked about Message Encryption from an historical point of view, from key directories to public key infrastructures and how to authenticate users to each other. Something interesting that Trevor talked about was CONIKS, some sort of Certificate Transparency-like protocol but for secure messaging (they call it key transparency).
when Alice wants to send a secure message to some other user, say Bob, her CONIKS client looks up Bob's key at the key directory, and verifies that this key has not changed unexpectedly over time. It also checks that this key is consistent with the key other clients are seeing for Bob. Only if these two consistency checks pass will the CONIKS client send Alice's message to Bob. The CONIKS client also performs these same checks for Alice's own key on a regular basis to ensure that the service provider is not tampering with Alice's key.
This sounds like an audit system (users can check what a key distribution server has been up to) + a gossip protocol (users can talk between them to verify consistency of the obtained public keys). Which seems like an excellent idea and makes me wonder why would Signal not use it.
djb mentioned the Self-Healing feature of ZRTP, similar to the recovery feature of Signal.
ZRTP caches symmetric key material used to compute secret session keys, and these values change with each session. If someone steals your ZRTP shared secret cache, they only get one chance to mount a MiTM attack, in the very next session. If they miss that chance, the retained shared secret is refreshed with a new value, and the window of vulnerability heals itself, which means they are locked out of any future opportunities to mount a MiTM attack. This gives ZRTP a "self-healing" feature if any cached key material is compromised.
Signal's self-healing property comes from the fact that an ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key agreement is continuously happening during communication. Like ZRTP it seems like it works out well only if the attacker is slow to act, thus it doesn't seem to be exactly comparable to backward secrecy (which might just be impossible in a protocol).
Later, someone (I don't know who from Felix Günther, Britta Hale, Tibor Jager and Sebastian Lauer because the program doesn't specify who the speaker is), presented on a 0-RTT system that would provide forward secrecy and anti-replayability. 0-RTT is one of the feature of TLS 1.3, which allows a client to start sending encrypted data to a server during its very first flight of messages. Unfortunately, and this was the topic of many discussions on TLS 1.3, these messages are replayable.
The work builds on top of Math Green's work with Puncturable Encryption where the server (and the client?) use some key derivation system and remove parts of it after a message has been sent using the 0-RTT feature. I am not sure if this system is really efficient though, especially since the point of 0-RTT is to be able to be fast. If this solution isn't faster or, worse, slower than doing a normal TLS 1.3 handshake (1.5 round trips) then the 0-RTT has no meaning in life anymore.
It also seems like this wouldn't be applicable to the "ticket" way of doing 0-RTT in TLS 1.3, which basically encrypts the whole state and hand up the opaque blob to the client, this way the server doesn't store anything.
Hugo Krawczyk (the HKDF guy) talked about passwords and leaks with some Comic Sans MS (and there was this handy website to check if your username/password/... had been compromised). Hugo then presented some of his recent work on SPHINX, PPSS, X-PAKE, ... everything is listed with link to papers here.
SPHINX is a client-focused and transparent-to-the-server password manager (like all of them really). The desktop password manager uses some derivation parameter stored online or on a user's mobile phone to derive any website key from a master password. The online service or the mobile phone never sees anything (thanks to a simple blinding technique, reminding me of what Ari Juel did last year's RWC with PASS). Because of that, no offline attack are possible. The slides are here and are pretty self explanatory. I have to admit that the design makes a lot of sense to me. I dozed off for the second part of the talk but it was about "How to store a secret" and his PPSS thing (Password Protected Secret Sharing), same for the third part of the talk that was about X-PAKE, which I can imagine was a mix of his ideas with the PAKE protocol.
There were two talks about memory-hardness and proving that password hashing functions are memory-hard. It seemed like some people think it's important that these functions be data-independent as well (probably because in some cases cache attacks might be an issue). Most of the techniques here seemed to make sure that a minimum amount of memory was to be used at all time, and that this couldn't be reduced. I would have liked to see a comparison between Argon2 (the winner of the PHC), Blake 2 (which seems to be the thing people like and use) and Balloon Hashing (which seems to be Dan Boneh's new thing).
George Tankersley and Filippo Valsorda finished the day with a talk on Cloudflare and their CAPTCHA problem. A lot of attacks/spam seems to come from TOR, which has deteriorated the reputation of the TOR nodes' IPs. This means that when Cloudflare sees some traffic coming from TOR, it will present the user with a CAPTCHA to make sure they are dealing with a human. TOR users tend to strongly dislike Cloudflare because these CAPTCHA are shown for every different website, and for every time the TOR path is changed (10 minutes?). This, in addition to TOR already slowing down your browsing efficiency, has annoyed more than one person. Cloudflare is trying to remediate the problem by giving not one, but N tokens to the user for one CAPTCHA solved. By using blind signatures Cloudflare hopes to demonstrate its inability to deanonymize users by using a CAPTCHA token as a tracking cookie.
(I have been made aware of this problem in the past and have manually added TOR visitors as an "allowed country" in my Cloudflare's setup for cryptologie.net., which is one of the solution given to Cloudflare's customers.)
The Lechvin prize was given to Joan Daemen, co-inventor of AES and SHA3, and to Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin for their work on the development on secure messaging.
Daemen talked about how block cipher might become a thing from the past, replaced by more efficient and faster permutation constructions (like the permutation-baed sponge construction they developed for SHA3).
Moxie Marlinspike gave an brilliant speech. Putting that into words would only uglify whatever was said, you will have to take my words for it.
Rich Salz gave a touching talk about the sad history of OpenSSL.
Thai Duong presented his Project Wycheproof that test java cryptographic libraries for common cryptographic pitfalls. They have something like 80 test vectors (easy to export to test other languages) and have uncovered 40+ vulnerabilities. One is being commented here.
L Jean Camp gave a talk on some X.509 statistics across phishing websites and the biggest websites (according to some akamai ranking). No full ipv4 range stats. Obviously the phishing websites were not bothering with TLS. And the speaker upset several people by saying that phishing websites should not be able to obtain certificates for similar-looking domains. Adam Langley took the mic to explain to her how orthogonal these issues were, and dropped the mic with a "we will kill the green lock".
Quan Nguyen gave a nice talk about some fun crypto vulns. Unfortunately I was dozing off, but everyone seemed to have appreciated the talk and I will be checking these slides as soon as they come up. (Some "different" ways to retrieve the authentication key from AES-GCM)
Daniel Franke presented the NTS (Network Time Security) protocol. It looks like it could protect NTP. Is it a competitor of roughtime? On the roughtime page we can read:
The obvious answer to this problem is to authenticate NTP replies. Indeed, if you want to do this there‘s NTPv4 Autokey from six years ago and NTS, which is in development. A paper at USENIX Security this year detailed how to do it so that it’s stateless at the server and still mostly using fast, symmetric cryptography.
But that's what NTP should have been, 15 years ago—it just allows the network to be untrusted. We aim higher these days.
So I guess NTS is not coming fast enough, hence the creation of roughtime. I personally like how anyone can audit roughtime servers.
Tancrède Lepoint presented on CRYSTAL, a lattice-based key exchange that seems like a competitor to New Hope. He also talked about Open Quantum Safe that contains a library of post quantum primitives as well as a fork of OpenSSL making use of this library. Someone from the public appeared to be pretty angry not to be cited first in the research, but the session chair (Dan Boneh) smoothly saved us from an awkward Q/A.
Mike Hamburg came up with STROBE, a bespoke TLS-like protocol based on one sponge construction. It targets embedded devices but isn't really focusing on speed (?) It's also heavily influenced by BLINKER and tries to improve it. It kinda felt like a competitor of the Noise Protocol Framework but looking at the paper it seems more confusing than that and much more interesting as well. From the paper:
Strobe is a framework for building cryptographic two-party protocols. It can also be used for symmetric cryptosystems such as hashing, AEAD, MACs, PRFs and PRNGs. It is also useful as the symmetric part of a Schnorr-style signature scheme.
That's it. If anyone can point me to other notes on the talks I'd gladly post a list of links in here as well:
I've been thinking a lot about sweet32 recently. And I decided to try to reproduce their results.
First let me tell you that the attack is highly impractical. It requires the user to execute some untrusted javascript for dozens of hours without interruption. The other problem that I encountered was that I couldn't reach the amount of requests they were able to make a client send. In their paper, they claim to be able to reach up to 2,000 requests per second.
I tried to achieve such good numbers with "normal" browsers, and the amount of requests I was able to make was ridiculously low. Then I realized that they used a specific browser: Firefox Developer Edition. A browser made for developing websites. For some unknown reason, it was true that this specific browser was able to send an impressive amount of requests per second. Although I was never able to reach that magical number of 2,000. And even then, who really uses Firefox Developer Edition?
It should be noted that their attack was done in a lab, with a small distance between the client and the server, under perfect condition, when no other traffic was slowing down the attack, etc... I can't imagine this attack being practical at all in real settings.
Note that I can imagine different settings than TLS, at a different point in time in the future, being able to send enough requests per second that this attack would be deemed practical. And in that sense, Sweet32 should be taken seriously. But for now, and especially in the case of TLS, I wouldn't freak out if I see a 64-bit block cipher being used.
A lot of attacks are theorized only to become practical years or decades later. This was the case with Bleichenbacher's and Vaudenay's padding oracle attacks, but also BEAST.
Realizing that Chosen-plaintext attacks were do-able on TLS -- because browsers would execute untrusted code on demand (javascript) -- a myriad of cryptanalysts decided to knock down on TLS.
POODLE was the first vulnerability that made us deprecate SSL 3.0. It broke the protocol in such a critical way that even a RFC was published about it.
BEAST was the one that made us move away from TLS 1.0. But a lot of embedded devices and products still use these lower versions and it would be unfair not to say that an easy patch can be applied to implementations of TLS 1.0 to counter this vulnerability.
BEAST comes from the fact that in TLS 1.0 the next message being encrypted with CBC will use the previous ciphertext's last block as IV. This makes the IV predictable and allow you to decrypt ciphertexts by sending many chosen plaintexts.
the diagram of CBC for encryption taken from wikipedia. Here imagine that the IV is the previous ciphertext's last block.
The counter measures server-side are well known: move to greater versions of TLS. But if the server cannot fix this, one simple counter measure can be applied on the client-side (remember, this is a client-side vulnerability, it allows a MITM attacker to recover session IDs, cookies, etc...).
Again: BEAST works because the MITM attacker can predict the next IV. He can just observe the previous ciphertext block and craft the plaintext based on it. It's an interactive attack.
One way of preventing this is to send an empty message before sending each message. The empty message will produce a ciphertext (of essentially the MAC), which the attacker will not be able to predict. The message that the attacker asked the browser to encrypt will thus be encrypted with this unpredictable IV. The attacked is circumvented.
This counter measure is called a 0/n split.
Unfortunately a lot of servers did not like this countermeasures too much. Chrome pushed that first and kind of broke the web for some users. Adam Langley talks about them paying the price for fixing this "too soon". Presumably this "no data" message would be seen by some implementations as a EOF (End Of File value).
One significant drawback of the current proposed countermeasure (sending empty application data packets) is that the empty packet might be rejected by the TLS peer (see comments #30/#50/others: MSIE does not accept empty fragments, Oracle application server (non-JSSE) cannot accept empty fragments, etc.)
To fix this, Firefox pushed a patch called a 1/n-1 split, where the message to be sent would be split into two messages, the first one containing only 1 byte of the plaintext, and the second one containing the rest.
If you look at a fixed client implementation sending messages over a negotiated TLS 1.0 connection, you will see that first it will send the first byte (in the screenshot below, the "G" letter), and then send the rest in a different TLS message.
If you're curious, you can see that being done in code in the recent BearSSL TLS library of Thomas Porning.
static unsigned char *
cbc_encrypt(br_sslrec_out_cbc_context *cc,
int record_type, unsigned version, void *data, size_t *data_len)
{
unsigned char *buf, *rbuf;
size_t len, blen, plen;
unsigned char tmp[13];
br_hmac_context hc;
buf = data;
len = *data_len;
blen = cc->bc.vtable->block_size;
/*
* If using TLS 1.0, with more than one byte of plaintext, and
* the record is application data, then we need to compute
* a "split". We do not perform the split on other record types
* because it turned out that some existing, deployed
* implementations of SSL/TLS do not tolerate the splitting of
* some message types (in particular the Finished message).
*
* If using TLS 1.1+, then there is an explicit IV. We produce
* that IV by adding an extra initial plaintext block, whose
* value is computed with HMAC over the record sequence number.
*/
if (cc->explicit_IV) {
/*
* We use here the fact that all the HMAC variants we
* support can produce at least 16 bytes, while all the
* block ciphers we support have blocks of no more than
* 16 bytes. Thus, we can always truncate the HMAC output
* down to the block size.
*/
br_enc64be(tmp, cc->seq);
br_hmac_init(&hc, &cc->mac, blen);
br_hmac_update(&hc, tmp, 8);
br_hmac_out(&hc, buf - blen);
rbuf = buf - blen - 5;
} else {
if (len > 1 && record_type == BR_SSL_APPLICATION_DATA) {
/*
* To do the split, we use a recursive invocation;
* since we only give one byte to the inner call,
* the recursion stops there.
*
* We need to compute the exact size of the extra
* record, so that the two resulting records end up
* being sequential in RAM.
*
* We use here the fact that cbc_max_plaintext()
* adjusted the start offset to leave room for the
* initial fragment.
*/
size_t xlen;
rbuf = buf - 4 - ((cc->mac_len + blen + 1) & ~(blen - 1));
rbuf[0] = buf[0];
xlen = 1;
rbuf = cbc_encrypt(cc, record_type, version, rbuf, &xlen);
buf ++;
len --;
} else {
rbuf = buf - 5;
}
}
/*
* Compute MAC.
*/
br_enc64be(tmp, cc->seq ++);
tmp[8] = record_type;
br_enc16be(tmp + 9, version);
br_enc16be(tmp + 11, len);
br_hmac_init(&hc, &cc->mac, cc->mac_len);
br_hmac_update(&hc, tmp, 13);
br_hmac_update(&hc, buf, len);
br_hmac_out(&hc, buf + len);
len += cc->mac_len;
/*
* Add padding.
*/
plen = blen - (len & (blen - 1));
memset(buf + len, (unsigned)plen - 1, plen);
len += plen;
/*
* If an explicit IV is used, the corresponding extra block was
* already put in place earlier; we just have to account for it
* here.
*/
if (cc->explicit_IV) {
buf -= blen;
len += blen;
}
/*
* Encrypt the whole thing. If there is an explicit IV, we also
* encrypt it, which is fine (encryption of a uniformly random
* block is still a uniformly random block).
*/
cc->bc.vtable->run(&cc->bc.vtable, cc->iv, buf, len);
/*
* Add the header and return.
*/
buf[-5] = record_type;
br_enc16be(buf - 4, version);
br_enc16be(buf - 2, len);
*data_len = (size_t)((buf + len) - rbuf);
return rbuf;
}
Note that this does not protect the very first byte we send. Is this an issue? Not for browsers. But the next time you encounter this in a different setting, think about it.
I see some discussions on some mailing lists about what parameters to use for Diffie-Hellman (DH).
It seems like the recent line of papers about weak Diffie-Hellman parameters (Logjam) and Diffie-Hellman backdoors (socat, the RFC 5114, the special primes, ...) has troubled more than one.
This is a non-problem. We don't need a RFC to choose Diffie-Hellman groups. A simple openssl gendh -out keyfile -2 2048 will generate a 2048-bit safe prime along with correct DH parameters for you to use. If you're worried about "special primes" issues, either make it yourself with this command, or pick a larger (let's say 4096-bit safe prime) from a list and verify that it's a safe prime. You can use this tool for that.
But since some people really don't want to do the work, here are some safe parameters you can use.
2048-bit parameters for Diffie-Hellman
Here's is the .pem file containing the parameters:
