On Oct 10, 2013, at 5:15 PM, Richard Outerbridge <ou...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
> How does this prevent MITM?  Where does G come from?

I'm assuming G is a systemwide shared parameter.  It doesn't prevent 
mitm--remember the idea here is to make a fairly lightweight protocol to run 
*inside* another crypto protocol like TLS.  The inner protocol mustn't add 
administrative requirements to the application, which means it can't need key 
management from some administrator or something.  The goal is to have an inner 
protocol which can run inside TLS or some similar thing, and which adds a layer 
of added security without the application getting more complicated by needing 
to worry about more keys or certificates or whatever.  

Suppose we have this inner protocol running inside a TLS version that is 
subject to one of the CBC padding reaction attacks.  The inner protocol 
completely blocks that.  

> I'm also leery of using literally the same key in both directions.  Maybe a 
> simple transform would suffice; maybe not.

I probably wasn't clear in my writeup, but my idea was to have different keys 
in different directions--there is a NIST KDF that uses only AES as its crypto 
engine, so this is relatively easy to do using standard components.  

--John
_______________________________________________
The cryptography mailing list
cryptography@metzdowd.com
http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

Reply via email to