Alex

Why don't you propose some text, as we have a bandwidth delay product with you.

thanks
tim

On 11/17/15 5:30 PM, Alex Mayrhofer wrote:
Hello,

Jumping into this thread late, sorry. Anyways, my proposal:

- I think we should stick with requiring 0x00 padding (I am avoiding the
term 'payload' here for a reason). This would prevent the abuse as a
covert channel, is easily understood and implementable, and should not
have any significant performance impact during creation of a message.

- In the sense of "be conservative what you send, be liberal what to
accept" I'm fine to change to text to require (recommend?) a Responder
to ignore the contents. Which means that a malformed padding will never
(rarely?) trigger an error response. However, my feeling is that we
should still allow a "strict Responder" to indicate an error. That boils
down to text like "a Responder MUST/SHOULD (?) ignore the contents of
Padding" - I'd go for SHOULD,  and subsequently keep the definition to
use FORMERR if a strict Responder wishes to indicate an error

- Further, I understand that TLS level compression is discouraged for
DNS anyways ( I'm not an expert in this field, but that's what I
understood what dkg said in our initial hallway discussion in Praha), so
I'd stick with 0x00. If we find out this is really a problem,  we can
always define a padding with more sophisticated contents which Updates
or Obsoletes this document. Requiring that a Responder ignores the
contents would create forward compatibility on the Responder end.

I'm more than happy to propose text if th WG agrees with the above
summary :-)

Alex
(from mobile, sorry for brevity and typos)



---- Stephen Farrell schrieb ----



On 17/11/15 01:43, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
 > On Mon 2015-11-16 16:20:21 -0500 <tel:21 -0500>, Stephen Farrell wrote:
 >> I agree that that is clearly the opinion in the TLS WG today. I'm
 >> less sure I agree that's correct - my fear is that it's being driven
 >> maybe too much by browsers and the web, where the conclusion is
 >> valid.
 >
 > Well, certainly for a system-wide (or application-wide) arbitrary DNS
 > client it's the same risk.

Similar but not quite the same. Cookies are the main likely target
of CRIME but a DPRIVE equivalent can only target the (non-inserted)
QNAME (or is there more?), which hasn't quite got the same kind of
sensitivity.

 >  We have no way of knowing how many avenues
 > there are for attackers to be able to make the user make certain DNS
 > requests to their preferred privacy-preserving resolver.

Sure. I would guess the introduction of DPRIVE will change the
attack surface and new attacks will be discovered. (Timing may
well prove a fertile ground I would guess.)

 > And since we expect (D)TLS channels to be kept open and reused, that
 > attacker-controlled data will be touching the same deflate dictionary
 > that the ostensibly private queries are using.  This is the same
 > scenario as CRIME and BREACH, no?

Depends. It is unclear to me why padding doesn't help here,
if applied after compression. (Mind you, at that point I don't
know why one is bothering with compressing;-)

 >
 >>> Any attempt at compression needs to happen at the application layer
 >>> itself with full knowledge of the risks and tradeoffs.
 >>
 >> FWIW, I don't agree with the above, I think it's generalising too
 >> much from the browser use-case.
 >
 > The point here is that if you don't know how the application layer mixes
 > attacker-controlled data with data that needs to be confidential, TLS
 > can't possibly do compression safely.

But what is the application layer for a system wide stub resolver?
Your argument would also imply DNS/DPRIVE can't do compression either.

 > So while i agree with you that there could be (non-browser) applications
 > that clearly never mix any attacker-controlled data with
 > sensitive/private data on the same TLS channel, the only way to know
 > whether you're in such a state is by reasoning about it *at the
 > application layer*, which is why that's where the decisions about
 > compression need to be made.

We don't agree about that. I don't think I've seen a convincing
argument that's the *only* way to know. (E.g. always emitting
fixed size packets in a single write and sending some cover
traffic now and then when there's any compression in play would
also seem to help, no?) But that's off topic for this list I
guess, and may get too complicated before it'd get useful
enough.

 >
 > anyway, i'm glad we agree on the outcome :)

Yep - isn't the entire discussion of compression for DNS
pretty moot anyway? It's not clear to me what compressible
plaintext there is where compression would be a real benefit.

Cheers,
S.


 >
 >      --dkg
 >
 > _______________________________________________
 > dns-privacy mailing list
 > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
 > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dns-privacy
 >


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