> On 15 Jan 2016, at 3:55 PM, Valery Smyslov <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Yoav,
> 
>>>> What does IPsec community think of it? Should we fix the protocol
>>>> to thwart this attack completely? Is the recommendation to move the COOKIE 
>>>> to the end of the message enough to achive that?
>>>> Will this change break many existing implementations?
>>> 
>>> As far as I can tell, the cookie hash algorithm is an implementation 
>>> decision
>>> of the responder and (despite what's implied in the paper) is never 
>>> specified
>>> in the protocol. It would be much simpler to add a section to the new 
>>> 4307bis
>>> saying that this hash is security-critical, and recommending SHA-256 or 
>>> stronger.
>> 
>> The SLOTH paper does not depend at all on the hash used to break the cookie.
>> They use the cookie mechanism to inject a prefix (Because the Initiator 
>> dutifully repeats
>> the cookie that the MITM gave them) to control the hash of the entire packet 
>> to create a collision.
>> They also rely on neither Initiator nor responder checking cookie lengths or 
>> even validating
>> the cookies if a DoS attack is not underway. Maybe we should specify that in 
>> the anti-ddos draft.
> 
> The initiator cannot validate the cookie - it is an opaque blob for him. 
> Should he reject
> the cookie if its length is more than 64 bytes? Possibly. I don't know.
> It's a bit strange to check an opaque object…

It’s an opaque object that the RFC says should be up to 64 bytes.

> What about the responder - he doesn't see any cookie in this attack - the 
> attacker
> sends the crafted cookie only to the initiator and sends a crafted
> IKE_SA_INIT message w/o cookie to the responder (as far as I understand the 
> attack).

There is a cookie. See Figure 12 in Paul’s blog post:
https://securityblog.redhat.com/2016/01/13/the-sloth-attack-and-ikeipsec/

The responder accepts a cookie that it never sent. It doesn’t check the cookie 
because there is, in fact, no DoS attack. That seems wrong.

Yoav

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