Jouni,

Actually, the descriptions in chapter 6 are incorrect, and need be fixed
to reflect the changes in chapter 4.

The KDF in chapter 4 was changed to allow PSKs of variable length and
entropy.  Using the PSK to directly key the KDF to generate the MK has
problems because most KDFs have fixed-length inputs for keys.  Imagine
someone who uses a 50-character passphrase (English text has around 2.5
bits of entropy per character, so that's roughly a 128-bit secure key). 
If we follow what's currently in chapter 6, we truncate that to 16 bytes,
which would only be 40 bits of security.  Not a good thing.

-- 
t. charles clancy, ph.d.  <>  [EMAIL PROTECTED]  <>  www.cs.umd.edu/~clancy

On Sat, October 21, 2006 1:43 pm, Jouni Malinen wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 03:50:02PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>      Title           : EAP Generalized Pre-Shared Key (EAP-GPSK)
>>      Author(s)       : C. Clancy, H. Tschofenig
>>      Filename        : draft-ietf-emu-eap-gpsk-00.txt
>
> While updating my implementation to the new draft, I noticed couple of
> conflicts in how the key derivation is defined. Chapter 4 uses
> KDF_Zero-String(PL || PSK | ...) to derive MK whereas 6.1.8 and 6.2.8
> use GKDF-#(PSK, ...). I would assume that the version in 6.1.8 and 6.2.8
> is the correct one and chapter 4 should be updated to match with this.
>
> Another difference is in whether CSuite_Sel is to be included in the
> GKDF data field. Chapter 4 seems to include it (just before
> inputString), but 6.1.8 and 6.2.8 do not. Should it be there or not?
>
>
> The new draft is trying to fix the GKDF-X n (number of output blocks)
> calculation, but that seems to have a typo of some sort.
>
> Now:  n = int( X / size - 1 ) + 1;
>
> That doesn't make any sense since -1 and +1 are are cancelling eachother
> and we are left with n = int( X / size ).
>
> I would assume that this was supposed to be taken into account rounding
> up (ceiling) by using n = int( (X + size - 1) / size ) which could be
> written as n = int( (X - 1) / size ) + 1.
>
> --
> Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA
>
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