Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-05 Thread Perry E. Metzger

lance james lan...@securescience.net writes:
 stupid question - does this effect IPSec realistically as well?

IPSec and IPSec related protocols like IKE use SHA-1 in various
places. Whether those actually could be attacked using the known
weaknesses in SHA-1 would require detailed examination of the individual
protocols.

In general, uses that require only preimage resistance are not yet at
risk, those that require collision resistance are. However, as has been
seen in the MD5-based fake CA attack, sufficiently clever people can
sometimes come up with ways to turn something that appears to depend on
preimage resistance into something that really only depends on collision
resistance.

This is all another way of saying no reason to panic, but moving to
things that use SHA-2 instead of SHA-1 would be a good idea.

Perry

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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-04 Thread Christian Rechberger

Quoting Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com:



Ray Dillinger b...@sonic.net writes:

I cannot derive a realistic threat model from the very general
statements in the slides.


(BTW, you mean threat, not threat *model*, in this instance.)

As just one obvious example of a realistic threat, consider that there
are CAs that will happily sell you certificates that use SHA-1.

Various clever forgery attacks have been used against certs that use
MD5, see:

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

Those attacks can now be extended to SHA-1 pretty easily. It might


It is in my opinion way to early to jump to this kind of conclusions:

Even if the new attack works are promised (and I have the feeling that  
people are too optimistic here), there is the following issue:


* these advanced attacks against CAs do require a special type of  
collision attack (the name chosen-prefix attack was coined), not a  
normal collision attack we are talking about here for the case of  
SHA-1. A chosen-prefix attack can be expected to be significantly  
harder to perform than a normal attack. The link you provided should  
contain a more in-depth discussion on this for the case of MD5.


Nevertheless, I agree that moving away from SHA-1 should be encouraged  
(since 2005).


Best,
 Christian

--
Christian Rechberger, Graz University of Technology, Austria.




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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-04 Thread Christian Rechberger

On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com wrote:


As just one obvious example of a realistic threat, consider that there
are CAs that will happily sell you certificates that use SHA-1.

Various clever forgery attacks have been used against certs that use
MD5, see:

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

Those attacks can now be extended to SHA-1 pretty easily. It might
require a bit of compute infrastructure -- say a lot of FPGAs and a
bunch of cleverness -- to turn out certs quickly, but it can be
done. Given that there are lots of high value certs out there of this
form, this is rather dangerous.


Off-the-shelf FPGA-based device that breaks DES by brute force in
about a week, costs 9,000 euros: http://www.copacobana.org/
These are commercially available and programmable. Setting a
few of them up to break SHA-1 certainly would not be trivial,
but it looks feasible.


The design of DES facilitates this kind of throughput/cost gains on FPGAs.

Remember that the MD4 family (incl. SHA-1) was designed to be  
efficient on 32-bit CPUs. For these hash functions, it is much harder  
to get a throughput/cost gain on FPGAs compared to off-the-shelf CPUs.  
At least, this was my conclusion when I quickly looked into this a few  
years ago.


Best,
 Christian

--
Christian Rechberger, Graz University of Technology, Austria

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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-04 Thread Thomas Coppi
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Christian Rechberger
christian.rechber...@tugraz.at wrote:
 The design of DES facilitates this kind of throughput/cost gains on FPGAs.

 Remember that the MD4 family (incl. SHA-1) was designed to be efficient on
 32-bit CPUs. For these hash functions, it is much harder to get a
 throughput/cost gain on FPGAs compared to off-the-shelf CPUs. At least, this
 was my conclusion when I quickly looked into this a few years ago.


The n...@home project(http://nsa.unaligned.org/) seems to do it pretty well.
He even provides the optimized SHA-1 and MD5 Verilog code used.  This only works
because straight-up bruteforce requires little memory, though. If the new
SHA-1 break requires significant memory usage I don't think something
like the COPACOBANA can help.

Regards,
-- 
Thomas Coppi

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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-03 Thread Sandy Harris
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com wrote:

 As just one obvious example of a realistic threat, consider that there
 are CAs that will happily sell you certificates that use SHA-1.

 Various clever forgery attacks have been used against certs that use
 MD5, see:

 http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

 Those attacks can now be extended to SHA-1 pretty easily. It might
 require a bit of compute infrastructure -- say a lot of FPGAs and a
 bunch of cleverness -- to turn out certs quickly, but it can be
 done. Given that there are lots of high value certs out there of this
 form, this is rather dangerous.

Off-the-shelf FPGA-based device that breaks DES by brute force in
about a week, costs 9,000 euros: http://www.copacobana.org/

These are commercially available and programmable. Setting a
few of them up to break SHA-1 certainly would not be trivial,
but it looks feasible.

-- 
Sandy Harris,
Quanzhou, Fujian, China

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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-02 Thread Jon Callas


It also is not going to be trivial to do this -- but it is now in the
realm of possibility.



I'm not being entirely a smartass when I say that it's always in the  
realm of possibility. The nominal probability for SHA-1 -- either 2^80  
or 2^160 depending on context -- is a positive number. It's small, but  
it's always possible.


The recent case of cert collisions happened because of two errors,  
hash problems and sequential serial numbers. If either had been  
corrected, the problem wouldn't have happened.


I liken in in analogy to a fender-bender that happened because the  
person responsible had both worn-out brakes (an easily-fixable  
technological problem) and was tailgating (an easily-fixable  
suboptimal operational policy). It's a mistake to blame the wreck on  
either. It's enlightening to point out that either a good policy or a  
more timely upgrade schedule would have made the problem not occur.


The problem right now is not that MD5, SHA1, etc. are broken. It is  
that they are broken in ways that you have to be an expert to  
understand and even the experts get into entertaining debates about.  
Any operational expert worth their salt should run screaming from a  
technology that the boffins have debates about flaws over dinner.


Jon

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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken! (was: Request for hash-dependency in Tahoe security.)

2009-05-01 Thread Ray Dillinger
On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 13:56 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:

  http://eurocrypt2009rump.cr.yp.to/837a0a8086fa6ca714249409ddfae43d.pdf

 Wow!  These slides say that they discovered a way to find collisions  
 in SHA-1 at a cost of only 2^52 computations.  If this turns out to  
 be right (and the authors are respected cryptographers -- the kind of  
 people who really hate to be wrong about something like this) then it  
 is very exciting! 

I cannot derive a realistic threat model from the very general
statements in the slides. 

In the case of, for example, the Debian organization, which uses SHA-1 
keys to check in code so that it's always clear with a distributed 
network of developers who made what changes, What threats must they 
now guard against and what corrective measures ought they take?

Can a third-party attacker now forge someone's signature and check in 
code containing a backdoor under someone else's key?  Such code could 
be loaded on a poisoned server, downloaded, and executed on millions
of target machines with devastating effect and no way to catch the 
attacker.

Can a rogue developer now construct a valid code vector B, having 
the same signature as some of his own (other) code A, thus bypassing
the signature check and inserting a backdoor?  The scenario is the 
same with a poisoned server but, once detected, the attacker would 
be identifiable.

Is it the case that a constructed hash collision between A and B 
can be done by a third party but would be highly unlikely to contain 
any executable or sensible code at all?  In this case the threat 
is serious, but mainly limited to vandalism rather than exploits.

Is it the case that a constructed hash collision between A and B 
can only be done by the developer of both A and B, but would be 
highly unlikely to contain any executable or sensible code at all?  
In this case the threat is very minor, because the identity of the 
vandal would be instantly apparent.

Bear








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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-01 Thread Perry E. Metzger

Ray Dillinger b...@sonic.net writes:
 I cannot derive a realistic threat model from the very general
 statements in the slides. 

(BTW, you mean threat, not threat *model*, in this instance.)

As just one obvious example of a realistic threat, consider that there
are CAs that will happily sell you certificates that use SHA-1.

Various clever forgery attacks have been used against certs that use
MD5, see:

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

Those attacks can now be extended to SHA-1 pretty easily. It might
require a bit of compute infrastructure -- say a lot of FPGAs and a
bunch of cleverness -- to turn out certs quickly, but it can be
done. Given that there are lots of high value certs out there of this
form, this is rather dangerous.

For example, Verisign has lots of cert infrastructure right now that
uses SHA-1. Imagine if I now use the above described attack and start
forging certs that look to all the world like they're from Verisign and
claim that I'm a major bank, or to forge a CA that then forges certs
that claim I'm a major bank. Ooops!

 In the case of, for example, the Debian organization, which uses SHA-1 
 keys to check in code so that it's always clear with a distributed 
 network of developers who made what changes, What threats must they 
 now guard against and what corrective measures ought they take?

One can easily imagine a forgery attack right now where someone
presented you with one piece of code which you sign and then made use of
a different piece of code with the exact same SHA-1 which you didn't
intend to sign. I don't know if Debian's specific processes are
vulnerable or not to various clever attacks -- it would require a lot of
thinking even if I was familiar enough with them, and I'm not.

So, use something other than SHA-1 -- SHA-256 at least. Don't panic,
don't flail around like a headless chicken, but do move away with all
deliberate speed.

 Can a third-party attacker now forge someone's signature and check in 
 code containing a backdoor under someone else's key?

Perhaps, if they're clever enough. The most obvious attacks require
preimage weaknesses, and those aren't known yet. However clever people
can find ways to get around this -- see the Rogue CA attack -- and
cause havoc.

 Is it the case that a constructed hash collision between A and B 
 can be done by a third party but would be highly unlikely to contain 
 any executable or sensible code at all?

See the Rogue CA attack -- by being clever enough, one can almost
certainly produce two executables with the same SHA-1 hash. They would
need some sort of area that varied, but that's not too hard -- ELF note
sections, data segments regions that contain some blob of data you don't
care about, etc., are all fine possibilities.

So, don't use SHA-1 if you can help it. This is not to say that all uses
are unsafe. There is also no need to panic. However, it is clearly not a
good idea to continue using it.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzgerpe...@piermont.com

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Re: [tahoe-dev] SHA-1 broken!

2009-05-01 Thread Perry E. Metzger

Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com writes:
 For example, Verisign has lots of cert infrastructure right now that
 uses SHA-1. Imagine if I now use the above described attack and start
 forging certs that look to all the world like they're from Verisign and
 claim that I'm a major bank, or to forge a CA that then forges certs
 that claim I'm a major bank. Ooops!

Eric Rescorla correctly points out to me that Verisign randomizes SNs so
it would be hard to attack them that way, but I'm sure not everyone
who is in the root cert list in IE or Firefox does.

It also is not going to be trivial to do this -- but it is now in the
realm of possibility.

Perry

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