Subject: Re: [dns-privacy] Core effort

From: Petr Spacek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 12:32:38 +0200

On 24.3.2014 12:21, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 03:51:30PM -0700,
>   Ted Hardie <[email-masked]> wrote
>   a message of 58 lines which said:
>
>> We may eventually get to active attacks as well, but those aren't likely to
>> be occurring at the moment because they aren't required; passive monitoring
>> of a cleartext protocol is enough.
>>
>> Do we have agreement that this is the core of what we're setting out to do?
>
> Not for me. The problem is that "active" or "passive" depends on the
> layer. According to Snowden files, the NSA is doing _active_ attacks
> (injecting packets with QUANTUM, planting malware with FOXACID) for
> the purpose of conducting _passive_ data collection.
>
> So, I do not think we should limit ourselves to passive attacks. I
I agree. Resiliency against passive attacks only is very very brittle and I 
hope we can do better.

Also, keep in mind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticated_encryption#cite_ref-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticated_encryption#cite_ref-2

Have a nice day!

-- 
Petr Spacek  @  Red Hat

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 07:54:37 -0400

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 6:32 AM, Petr Spacek <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I agree. Resiliency against passive attacks only is very very brittle and
> I hope we can do better.
>
> Also, keep in mind

The current status of my code is that I am getting close to being able to
do a demo of a scheme that is actually quite a bit simpler than DTLS.

I have had a look at the authenticated encryption modes but I think we are
better off with AES + HMAC-SHA2 right now. The problem is that several of
the crypto libraries do not expose the AES block operation as a primitive
which means having to re-implement AES to do modes other than the vanilla
ones. And reimplementing means losing the advantage of access to built in
crypto hardware.

If we were going to use authenticated encryption we would probably need to
warn the platform providers that is where we are headed. For example
through something like this:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hallambaker-consensuscrypto/

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/