Hi Tero,

please see below.

Thanks,
        Yaron

On 01/17/2013 07:38 PM, Tero Kivinen wrote:
Yaron Sheffer writes:
Actually, why? At first sight they look entirely reasonable to me
(untruncated versions of MAC, where we usually truncate). Are you saying
they are not well defined?

I do not think they offer anything compared to the truncated versions,
i.e. it just adds a 2nd way to do exactly same thing with no clear
reason.

Whether they're adding anything or not is for cryptographers to say. Sec. 5 of RFC 2104 is very equivocal about this.

OTOH your proposal would mean one more difference between "regular" IPsec implementations and FC-specific ones. I don't think that would be a good thing.


Note that RFC2104 section 5 says that there are some advantages of
truncating the output of the hash-based MAC functions (even though the
results are not absolute).

See above.


If they're both well-defined and secure, I don't see any reason to add
this limitation.

They are not defined for IP use at all. None of the IKEv2/ESP over IP
uses those values. Ah, found text from our IPsec/IKE Roadmap:

                   For HMAC-SHA-1 and HMAC-MD5, the IKEv2 IANA registry
    contains values for both the truncated version and the standard non-
    truncated version; thus, IKEv2 has the capability to negotiate either
    version of the algorithm.  However, only the truncated version is
    used for IKEv2 SAs and for IPsec SAs.  The non-truncated version is
    reserved for use by the Fibre Channel protocol [RFC4595].  For the
    other algorithms (AES-XCBC, HMAC-SHA-256/384/512, AES-CMAC, and HMAC-
    RIPEMD), only the truncated version can be used for both IKEv2 and
    IPsec-v3 SAs.

which actually says we always use truncated version (so I was wrong
they are not forbidden anywhere, missed this text last time as it uses
SHA-1 spelling not SHA1, which I was searching for :-).


This text is simply describing the existing situation. It is not at all normative.

After all, we do have much weirder algorithms in the registry.

That is true, and I do not consider that as a good thing. It is much
better to have one good way of doing things than two ways of doing
same thing, especially if those two ways are about the same.


Yes, but people have good reasons to add algorithms, which is (part of the reason) why we negotiate them in the protocol. Thus "Tiger", "camellia" and the like, and I'm sure the FC folks had a good reason for the untruncated algorithms, too.
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