Re: why does the pkcs12 tool use such short mac salts?

On Sun, 2025-06-08 at 14:32 +1000, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 07, 2025 at 01:56:24PM -0500, Thomas Anderson wrote:
> 
> > My question is...  why is OpenSSL using such a short salt? I know
> > the
> > PKCS12 standard leaves a lot to be desired, as elaborated by
> > https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/pfx.html . Maybe the
> > RFC's
> > recommendations for salt length are best just ignored?
> 
> Perhaps not the answer you're looking for, but the best available
> reason
> is that this is the length chosen in:
> 
>     commit 8d8c7266d4de9887fb0190a0770df9dc254a16a3
>     Date:   Sun Mar 28 23:17:34 1999 +0000
> 
> and it hasn't changed since.
> 
>     $ git grep PKCS12_SALT_LEN
>     crypto/pkcs12/p12_mutl.c:        saltlen = PKCS12_SALT_LEN;
>     include/openssl/pkcs12.h.in:# define PKCS12_SALT_LEN 8
> 
> If you'd like to see it updated, perhaps you're willing to open a
> github
> issue?

Actually it was already changed to 16 on the master branch. I.e., 3.6
release should use 16 bytes salt by default.


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Tomáš Mráz, Public Support and Security Manager, OpenSSL Foundation
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