Re: hamachi p2p vpn nat-friendly protocol details

2006-02-28 Thread Eric Rescorla
Travis H. [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 On 2/24/06, Alex Pankratov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Tero Kivinen wrote:
  Secondly I cannot find where it
  authenticates the crypto suite used at all (it is not included in the
  signature of the AUTH message).

 Crypto suite is essentially just a protocol number. It requires
 no authentication. If the server side responds with HELO.OK, it
 means that it can comprehend specified protocol revision. Similar
 to what happens during the SSH handshake.

 In SSL, the lack of authentication of the cryptosuite could be used to
 convince a v3 client that it is communicating with a v2 server, and
 the v3 server that it is communicating with a v2 client, causing them
 to communicate using SSL v2, which is called the version rollback
 attack.

This isn't quite accurate.

SSLv2 didn't do any kind of downgrade protection at all, for the
version number, cipher suite, or anything else. SSLv3 used a MAC
across the entire handshake. The tricky problem is to protect
downgrade from SSLv3 to SSLv2, which obviously can't be done with the
SSLv3 mechanisms. The trick that SSLv3 used was that when falling back
to SSLv2, SSLv3-capable clients would pad their RSA PKCS#1 blocks
in a special way that SSLv3 servers would detect. If they detected
it, that meant there had been a downgrade.

Unfortunately, not all clients correctly generate this padding
and the check wasn't universally implemented correctly:

http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20051011.txt


-Ekr

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Re: hamachi p2p vpn nat-friendly protocol details

2006-02-26 Thread Alex Pankratov
I replied to Tero privately, then realized that I was
not the only recipient of his email. So here's a copy
for everyone's reference.

Alex

Tero Kivinen wrote:

 Travis H. writes:


http://www.hamachi.cc/security

Based on a cursory look over this, I'm impressed by both the level of
detail and the level of security apparently afforded.  Too bad I can't
see the source code.



 I can see couple of problems in the system. Firstly it seems it uses
 same key for both directions for the encryption and for
 authentication, i.e. the KEYMAT is only split to Ke and Ka keys, which
 are used for encryption and authentication. In general using same keys
 for different directions is bad.


The description on a page was not updated properly. Recent clients
use per-direction keys after they complete P2P KE.


 Secondly I cannot find where it
 authenticates the crypto suite used at all (it is not included in the
 signature of the AUTH message).


Crypto suite is essentially just a protocol number. It requires
no authentication. If the server side responds with HELO.OK, it
means that it can comprehend specified protocol revision. Similar
to what happens during the SSH handshake.


 Also it seems that the identity itself
 is not authenticated at all, as it (or it's MACed form) is not
 included in the signature.


It is not.


 There might be (I am not sure whether AUTH
 packet is encrypted and MACed) a MAC over it, but the MAC key is not
 yet authenticated as it is generated from the anonymous
 Diffie-Hellman. That might give it some protection, but I am not sure
 if that is enough.


A protection against what kind of attack ?

Identity is used to specify which public key the client wants
to be authenticated with on the server side. Assuming it is
swapped in transition by a man in the middle, it would still
require an attacker to re-sign authentication hash in the
message.

Assuming he has a private key to do that, he will effectively
succeed in authenticating under substituted ID. He then will
need to re-sign server's auth hash to complete the attack,
which is not going to happen.

There is an off chance that the attacker might swapped the
identity to one that has the same public key. The chances
of this happening are infinitely small unless an attacker
also has an access to victim's keypair, which becomes a
trivial attack case.


 The protocol description is missing some details, so cannot say
 anything about them (things like what is the format of Ni, Nr, Gi, Gr
 when sent over wire and when put to the signatures etc, are the Gi, Gr
 always the lenght of modulus (2048 bits) etc).


What would you like to know exactly ? The page was not meant to
be a bit-level description of messages, merely a description of
the security framework.


 The protocol is also tied to use SHA1.


If you are referring to HMAC-SHA1 for authentication hashes, it
is a part of a crypto suite (protocol revision) spec.


 In general it would be much better to use standard protocol, instead
 of generating your own.


This is the second revision of Hamachi system. First revision
was using SSL for cli-srv and IKE/ESP for p2p security. It was
a prototype and it soon become obvious that both SSL and IKE
were overkills for our purposes. We did not need certificate
authentication of SSL, we did not want to run our own auth
protocol over SSL/AnonDH, which would've increased the number
of packets per login sequence. We didn't need the flexibility
(ie complexity) of IKE either.

After stripping down IKE (ie removing SA negotiation, reworking
ID payloads and not doing quick mode), we essentially ended up
with a protocol that was also fit for securing cli-srv session.
It was further tweaked and replaced SSL.

I should probably add that I implemented IKE (v1) keying daemon
from scratch with all bells and wistles (NATT, extended MODP
groups, etc) at some point in the past. Some remnants of it
are still floating around, the library name was libike.


 Designing security protocols is hard...


Yes, it is. This is why I like it.



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Re: hamachi p2p vpn nat-friendly protocol details

2006-02-26 Thread Travis H.
On 2/24/06, Alex Pankratov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Tero Kivinen wrote:
  Secondly I cannot find where it
  authenticates the crypto suite used at all (it is not included in the
  signature of the AUTH message).

 Crypto suite is essentially just a protocol number. It requires
 no authentication. If the server side responds with HELO.OK, it
 means that it can comprehend specified protocol revision. Similar
 to what happens during the SSH handshake.

In SSL, the lack of authentication of the cryptosuite could be used to
convince a v3 client that it is communicating with a v2 server, and
the v3 server that it is communicating with a v2 client, causing them
to communicate using SSL v2, which is called the version rollback
attack.  This is not relevant to the hamachi protocol because there
is no negotiation.  Nevertheless, authenticating the previous
plaintext fields once a secure channel is established is considered
good form.

In Schneier's Practical Cryptography, he suggests computing the MAC
over the entire history of sent messages, which ensures that any
tampering is detected at the next MAC.  This is eventually what was
done in SSLv3, for reasons Tero alluded to and which are successfully
thwarted for the reasons you describe.

  The protocol description is missing some details, so cannot say
  anything about them (things like what is the format of Ni, Nr, Gi, Gr
  when sent over wire and when put to the signatures etc, are the Gi, Gr
  always the lenght of modulus (2048 bits) etc).

 What would you like to know exactly ? The page was not meant to
 be a bit-level description of messages, merely a description of
 the security framework.

Presumably he wants to make sure that the messages like the following
have an unambiguous interpretation:
AUTH Identity Signature(Ni | Nr | Gi | Gr, Kpri_cli)
Merely concatenating them is insufficient unless all but one have a
fixed length.
I think a terse unambiguous representation rationale is the whole
reason for ASN.1, although it seems awfully complex for such a simple
goal.

I sort of wonder at the utility of a TCP implementation of the p2p
VPN... tunnelling TCP over TCP is well known to be a Bad Thing with
regard to interaction of the TCP timeouts.

Aside:  Can anyone tell me why the constants used in ipad and opad for
HMAC were chosen?  If they're not arbitrary, I'd like to know the
rationale behind them.
--
Security Guru for Hire http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/ --
GPG fingerprint: 9D3F 395A DAC5 5CCC 9066  151D 0A6B 4098 0C55 1484

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Re: hamachi p2p vpn nat-friendly protocol details

2006-02-26 Thread Alex Pankratov


Travis H. wrote:
 On 2/24/06, Alex Pankratov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
Tero Kivinen wrote:

[snip]

The protocol description is missing some details, so cannot say
anything about them (things like what is the format of Ni, Nr, Gi, Gr
when sent over wire and when put to the signatures etc, are the Gi, Gr
always the lenght of modulus (2048 bits) etc).

What would you like to know exactly ? The page was not meant to
be a bit-level description of messages, merely a description of
the security framework.
 
 
 Presumably he wants to make sure that the messages like the following
 have an unambiguous interpretation:
 AUTH Identity Signature(Ni | Nr | Gi | Gr, Kpri_cli)
 Merely concatenating them is insufficient unless all but one have a
 fixed length.
 I think a terse unambiguous representation rationale is the whole
 reason for ASN.1, although it seems awfully complex for such a simple
 goal.

Nonces and DH exponents are serialized using PER-style ASN.1 encoding.
So the whole concatenation is unambigious.

 I sort of wonder at the utility of a TCP implementation of the p2p
 VPN... tunnelling TCP over TCP is well known to be a Bad Thing with
 regard to interaction of the TCP timeouts.

Just to be clear, Hamachi tunnels VPN/P2P traffic over UDP. TCP is
used for client-server session only.

VPN over TCP is bad for two reasons. One you listed, and another
is that it becomes trivial to DoS this kind of VPN. TCP packets
are not authenticated (unless MD5/BGP extension is used, which
is unlikely), so the state of VPN transport layer and consequently
the state of a tunnel can be altered by 3rd party.

That's why SSL VPNs make very little sense in non-proxied setups
and that's why (I'd guess) OpenVPN 'tweaked' SSL to run over UDP
instead.


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hamachi p2p vpn nat-friendly protocol details

2006-02-23 Thread Travis H.
http://www.hamachi.cc/security

Based on a cursory look over this, I'm impressed by both the level of
detail and the level of security apparently afforded.  Too bad I can't
see the source code.
--
Security Guru for Hire http://www.lightconsulting.com/~travis/ --
GPG fingerprint: 9D3F 395A DAC5 5CCC 9066  151D 0A6B 4098 0C55 1484

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