On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 10:23 AM, Yoav Nir <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> On 19 Mar 2017, at 16:55, Eric Rescorla <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Overall:
> I notice that you are using a construction different from that used
> in TLS 1.3, which doesn't directly repeat nonces across associations.
>
> I didn't see an answer to this.


>
> S 2.
>    This document does not consider AES-CBC ([RFC3602])as AES-CBC
>    requires the IV to be unpredictable.  Deriving it directly from the
>    packet counter as described below is insecure.
>
> Can you provide a cite for this?
>
>
> Even RFC 3602 requires that the IV be randomly generated (and for good
> measure requires that it be unpredictable)
>

That's just a cite to a requirement, not to it being insecure. Do you have
a citation to the relevant threat?


> In any case, note that there are
> straightforward algorithms for deriving a CBC IV from a counter
> (e.g., run AES in counter mode with a different key). That structure
> would actually be suitable for GCM as well (and would address
> my point above).
>
>
> If each implementation generates a random key and uses this to generate
> the IVs this is fine, but you still have to transmit the IV.  If we derive
> an “IV key” from the keying material, then we don’t have to transmit the
> IV.
>

You generate the IV from the sequence number, so you don't need to transmit
the IV.
That gives you an unpredictable IV without the per-packet overhead.


We did bring this idea up at a WG meeting. This was not well-received for
> three reasons: (1) it’s unnecessarily complicated. (2) The world is going
> to AEAD. AES-CBC is the past, and (3) The perception was that saving 8
> bytes per packet was important mostly for IoT, and they don’t care about
> CBC.
>

Sure, that's reasonable. I'm merely observing that there are designs which
work for CBC.


S 3.
>    o  IV: Initialization Vector.  Although security requirements vary,
>       the common usage of this term implies that the value is
>       unpredictable.
>
> I don't think that this is true at all. I've frequently heard of a
> zero IV. It's also odd in that your IV is in fact predictable.
>
>
> S 5.
> I'm a bit surprised that you are deciding to have duplicate
> code points for every algorithm rather than some sort of IKE
> negotiation payload. I see that the WG is currently defining
> other extensions where you take that approach.
>
>
> See slide #7 of https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-
> 96-ipsecme-0.pdf
>
> The problem is that IKEv2 has strict rules about unexpected attributes in
> the substructures of the SA payload. The sense of the room was to go with
> new identifiers.
>

OK. Well, I agree it's ultimately a WG decision, but it doesn't seem very
elegant.

-Ekr


>
> Yoav
>
>
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