> On Nov 8, 2022, at 1:03 PM, Russ Housley <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Sophie:
> 
>> On Sat, Nov 5, 2022 at 9:29 AM Russ Housley <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> The Security Considerations is already longer than the rest of the document. 
>>  And, the specification already says that AES-CTR MUST be used with some 
>> other integrity mechanism.  In the SUIT environment, the integrity mechanism 
>> a digital signature.
>> But using AES-CTR with another integrity mechanism alone does not help, 
>> since signature stripping would still work. For an example of a signature 
>> stripping attack with AES-CTR, see [1].
>> 
>> All of these issues are in the end avoidable by a good implementation (i.e. 
>> one that annotates keys with their algorithm, and does not use the alg field 
>> in order to make algorithm decisions), but experience shows that 
>> implementers are not always careful reading advisory sections of a spec. A 
>> clear distinction on the standard level, making sure that these two things 
>> are different and should use different methods does help a lot with this 
>> issue, as it acts as a somewhat self-enforcing advisory, and seems to get 
>> you exactly what you want in terms of functionality.
>> 
>> I'm slightly confused why you would use COSE at all if you are worried about 
>> overhead, instead of using the output format of the cryptographic standard 
>> directly, that seems to be a preferable choice for this use case?
>> 
>> [1] 
>> https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-of-week-apple-imessage/
>>  
>> <https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-of-week-apple-imessage/>
> 
> I do not believe that a signature stripping attack will work in the SUIT 
> firmware case, as you say with good implementations,  In the SUIT case, if 
> there is no signature, the firmware will be be accepted.


HUGE TYPO:  ... will not be accepted.

Russ

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