Gutmann Soundwave Therapy

[Leichter, Jerry]

| >I don't propose to get into an extended debate about whether it is
| >better to use SRTP or to use generic DTLS. That debate has already
| >happened in IETF and SRTP is what the VoIP vendors are
| >doing. However, the good news here is that you can use DTLS to key
| >SRTP (draft-ietf-avt-dtls-srtp), so there's no need to invent a new
| >key management scheme.
| 
| Hmm, given this X-to-key-Y pattern (your DTLS-for-SRTP example, as
| well as OpenVPN using ESP with TLS keying), I wonder if it's worth
| unbundling the key exchange from the transport?
A system I designed has this property:  You can choose the key exchange
mechanism separately from the encryption mechanism.  In fact, the
end user can select this (though generally he chooses one of a number
of pre-defined options, which internally are just macros).  The
encryption mechanism is able to enforce a quality constraint on which
keying mechanisms it's willing to deal with - e.g., only the NULL
encryption mechanism is willing to accept the "NO_KEY" key exchange.

I did make a simplifying assumption that there is a linear ranking
of quality for keying mechanisms, so that what an encryptor actually
specifies is "at least this strength".  There's a similar assumed
ranking for encryption mechanisms.  Negotiation is done by having
each end specify which keying and encryption mechanisms it is
willing to use (those it implements, filtered by user-specified
constraints), and then choosing the "strongest" in the intersection
of the mechanisms common to both.  In principle, one could similarly
choose an authentication mechanism.

The linear ranking worked in the particular situation where I designed
this but isn't generalizable.  Without that, things get much more
complex - you lose the nice property of the current implementation
that the two ends need merely exchange what the implement, and then
proceed independently to choose the "best" among the available
choices (and always come to the same conclusions).

All of this ignores a significant issue:  Are keying and encryption
(and authentication) mechanisms really independent of each other?
I'm not aware of much work in this direction.  Most of what's out
there is negative results that, on the one hand, tell you that
general independence theorems are impossible; but on the other,
they tend to be based on clearly pathological combinations, which
hints that independence theorems *might* be possible, if we knew
how to constrain the different components to avoid the pathologies.

							-- Jerry

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