Re: IQ Handling vulnerabilities

Thijs Alkemade <[email protected]> Tue, 11 Feb 2014 16:33:26 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.ietf.xmpp
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 11 feb. 2014, at 16:14, Alexander Holler <[email protected]> wrote:

> Am 11.02.2014 13:29, schrieb Dave Cridland:
>> On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 12:23 PM, Alexander Holler <[email protected]>wrote:
>> 
>>> Hmm, in all these mails it was never be mentioned that IDs still have to
>>> be unique over some time for one session. I'm not sure if such is given
>>> with the above constructs. It might be very unlikely that the same ID will
>>> appear twice, but someone has to take a deeper look at it when using such
>>> constructs like above. Of course, in reality the window in time IDs must be
>>> unique is rather small, but ...
>>> 
>> 
>> You'd need random collisions amongst cryptographically secure hashes.
>> You're pretty safe.
> 
> I don't aggree. You are safe if you use the hash as intendend, but not
> if you just use some part of the hash(-number) or hashes of hashes. I'm
> not sure about how safe it is (in regard to collisions) if you look at
> consequent hashes of hashes. I would assume that is not what
> cryptographers do look for (primarily).
> 
> At least I can't remember to have seen some discussion if the series of
> hash(hash(hash(...))) is collision free (that is imho quiet different
> than hash(random); hash(random)). Of course, I'm not looking that often
> at cryptographic papers, I usually prefer if cryptographers do such. ;)

You're not going to stumble upon a SHA-1 collision by accident. Even if you do
"hashes of hashes". The esitmated cost of an intentional SHA-1 collision is
still at least $1M:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/when_will_we_se.html

If you do happen to find one, congratulations, you are now famous. Nobody has
published a SHA-1 collision yet.

Collisions in 'id's is also not very relevant. In any XMPP client, there will
be a finite list of 'id's for which it still expects a reply (outstanding
queries, unacked messages). Checking against each of those is trivial.

Thijs

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