Sounds good to me.

-----Original Message-----
From: Russ Housley <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, 14 May 2021 at 21:21
To: John Mattsson <[email protected]>
Cc: cose <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [COSE] draft-ietf-cose-countersign-02 - Secruity problems with 
COSE_Encrypt and COSE_Encrypt0 with CCM_8

John:

Thanks.  I wonder it it would be better go a bit higher level.  I am not sure 
that the external_add really has an impact on choosing whether the COSE_Mac is 
a good countersign mechanism.

I think there are two points:

1) When either COSE_Encrypt and COSE_Mac is used and more than two parties 
share the key, data origin authentication is not provided.  Any party that 
knows the message-authentication key can compute a valid authentication tag; 
therefore, the contents could originate from any one of the parties that share 
the key.

2) Countersignatures of COSE_Encrypt and COSE_Mac with short authentication 
tags do not provide the security properties associated with the same algorithm 
used in COSE_Sign. To provide 128-bit security against collision attacks, the 
tag length MUST be at least 256-bits. A countersignature of a COSE_Mac with 
AES-MAC 256/128 provides at most 64 bits of integrity protection.  Similarly, a 
countersignature of a COSE_Encrypt with AES-CCM-16-64-128 provides at most 32 
bits  bits of integrity protection.

What do you think?

Russ


> On May 13, 2021, at 8:04 AM, John Mattsson 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Russ,
> 
> I made a PR with a first draft of such text
> 
> https://protect2.fireeye.com/v1/url?k=6986d68b-361def8b-69869610-86fc6812c361-168e94aab5dee6e2&q=1&e=c50492cc-e1eb-4f25-b1ab-871818930a05&u=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fcose-wg%2Fcountersign%2Fpull%2F6
> 
> "Countersignatures of COSE_Encrypt and COSE_Mac with short tags and non-empty 
> external_aad do not at all give the security properties normally associated 
> with the same algorithm used in COSE_Sign. To provide 128-bit security 
> against collision attacks, the tag length MUST be at least 256-bits. A 
> countersignature of a COSE_Mac with AES-MAC 256/128 only gives 64-bit 
> security and a countersignature of a COSE_Encrypt with AES-CCM-16-64-128 only 
> gives 32-bit security. Another solution is to provide the same external_aad 
> used in the COSE_Encrypt and COSE_Mac to the countersignature algorithm, but 
> this external_aad is typically not available to the party performing or 
> verifying the countersignature."
> 
> Cheers,
> John
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Russ Housley <[email protected]>
> Date: Monday, 15 March 2021 at 17:58
> To: John Mattsson <[email protected]>
> Cc: cose <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [COSE] draft-ietf-cose-countersign-02 - Secruity problems with 
> COSE_Encrypt and COSE_Encrypt0 with CCM_8
> 
> John:
> 
> Are you asking for addition text in the security considerations to warn 
> against short MACs?  If so, can you provide the first draft of such text?
> 
> Russ
> 
> 
>> On Mar 12, 2021, at 3:12 AM, John Mattsson 
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> When I analysed an earlier version of Group OSCORE some years ago it had 
>> severe security problems when used with CCM_8 + Countersignature. The 
>> attacks were pretty bad. 64-bit offline complexity against source 
>> authentication/availability from a different person in the group and 
>> something slightly over 32-bit online security (collecting 2^32 messages) 
>> against a source authentication/availability from a third party outside of 
>> the group. The problem was that the countersignature relied on the AEAD tag 
>> for integrity protection of the additional data. This was fixed in Group 
>> OSCORE be adding all the additional data to the signature as well.
>> 
>> The use case of Countersignatures is "Countersignatures provide a method of 
>> having a second party sign some data." In this case I don't think CCM_8 + 
>> Countersignature provides the expected security. Unless you can put all the 
>> additional data to the signature as well, I think CCM_8 + Countersignature 
>> needs to be forbidden.
>> 
>> I don't really see why Group OSCORE is using countersign in the first place, 
>> it seems like a relic from a time when it was assumed that OSCORE would be a 
>> single COSE structure on the wire as well.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> John
> 
> 
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