Gutmann Soundwave Therapy

Leichter, Jerry leichter_jerrold at emc.com
Thu Feb 7 10:34:42 EST 2008


| > 	- Truncate the MAC to, say, 4 bytes.  Yes, a simple brute
| > 		force attack lets one forge so short a MAC - but
| > 		is such an attack practically mountable in real
| > 		time by attackers who concern you?
| 
| In fact, 32-bit authentication tags are a feature of
| SRTP (RFC 3711). 
Great minds run in the same ruts.  :-)

| > 	- Even simpler, send only one MAC every second - i.e.,
| > 		every 50 packets, for the assumed parameters.
| > 		Yes, an attacker can insert a second's worth
| > 		of false audio - after which he's caught.  I
| > 		suppose one could come up with scenarios in
| > 		which that matters - but they are very specialized.
| > 		VOIP is for talking to human beings, and for
| > 		human beings in all but extraordinary circumstances
| > 		a second is a very short time.
| 
| Not sending a MAC on every packet has difficult interactions with
| packet loss. If you do the naive thing and every N packets send a MAC
| covering the previous N packets, then if you lose even one of those
| packets you can't verify the MAC. But since some packet loss is
| normal, an attacker can cover their tracks simply by removing one out
| of every N packets.
*Blush*.  Talk about running in the same ruts.  I was specifically
talking about dealing with lossy datagram connections, but when I came
to making a suggestion, suggested one I'd previously considered for
non-lossy stream connections.  Streams are so much easier to reason
about - it's easy to get caught.  (It's also all too easy to forget
that no stream implementation really implements the abstract semantics
of a reliable stream - which is irrelevant in some cases, but very
significant in others.)

| Since (by definition) you don't have a copy of the packet you've lost,
| you need a MAC that survives that--and is still compact. This makes
| life rather more complicated. I'm not up on the most recent lossy
| MACing literature, but I'm unaware of any computationally efficient
| technique which has a MAC of the same size with a similar security
| level. (There's an inefficient technique of having the MAC cover all
| 2^50 combinations of packet loss, but that's both prohibitively
| expensive and loses you significant security.)
My suggestion for a quick fix:  There's some bound on the packet loss
rate beyond which your protocol will fail for other reasons.  If you
maintain separate MAC's for each k'th packet sent, and then deliver k
checksums periodically - with the collection of checksums itself MAC'ed,
a receiver should be able to check most of the checksums, and can reset
itself for the others (assuming you use a checksum with some kind of
prefix-extension property; you may have to send redundant information
to allow that, or allow the receiver to ask for more info to recover).

Obviously, if you *really* use every k'th packet to define what is in
fact a substream, an attacker can arrange to knock out the substream he
has chosen to attack.  So you use your encryptor to permute the
substreams, so there's no way to tell from the outside which packet is
part of which substream.  Also, you want to make sure that a packet
containing checksums is externally indistinguishable from one containing
data.  Finally, the checksum packet inherently has higher - and much
longer-lived - semantic value, so you want to be able to request that
*it* be resent.  Presumably protocols that are willing to survive data
loss still have some mechanism for control information and such that
*must* be delivered, even if delayed.

Tons of hand-waving there; at the least, you have to adjust k and
perhaps other parameters to trade off security and overhead.  I'm
pretty sure something along these lines could be done, but it's
certainly not off-the-shelf.
							-- Jerry

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