Re: Albrecht/Paterson/Watson's attack

Simon Tatham <[email protected]> writes:

>  (a) the subject of the whole paper, i.e. an attack on the encryption
>      which involves substituting an initial cipher block and inferring
>      from the subsequent failure mode some information about the
>      length field to which it decrypted. Putting the length field in
>      cleartext rather than in the first cipher block defeats this
>      attack.

If you said that the attacker can infer information about the initial
cleartext, *after* the length field, then a cleartext length field might
be an improvement. I imagine that attacks like that might be possible
with CBC mode, but is seems highly unlikely if using something like
aes-ctr or salsa20.

But if the problem is leaking information about the length field itself,
a change to instead send that information totally in the clear cannot be
an improvement.

To adress leaking of length info to active attackers, one would need a
redesign where information about the length never reveals anything
sensitive, a bit like what you sketched.

I guess I ought to read the paper myself, but I don't have the time to
do that right away.

> Option (3), encrypting the packet length and MACing it separately,
> defeats both types of attack as far as I can see.

Given the close connection between ssh transport packets and packets for
the userauth and connection protocols, I think it's desirable to encrypt
the length (and in general, try to hide message boundaries).

But an additional MAC gives a significant additional overhead. Maybe one
could get away with a short MAC for the first block (including the
length), provided that the MAC at the end of the cryptotext covers the
complete message?

Regards,
/Niels

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Niels Möller. PGP-encrypted email is preferred. Keyid C0B98E26.
Internet email is subject to wholesale government surveillance.