Top posting so that others on the list can chime in.

While discussing the privacy implications of external PSK identities, Jim 
Schaad in his email below recommends that we could describe techniques for 
importing external PSK identities (that may be typed in by the user). He 
suggests that we could consider using a construct based on one way hash 
functions so that the typed-in external PSK identity (presumably with not so 
good privacy properties) are never sent on the wire.

--Mohit

On 7/8/20 5:45 PM, Jim Schaad wrote:


From: Mohit Sethi M 
<mohit.m.se...@ericsson.com><mailto:mohit.m.se...@ericsson.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 1:03 AM
To: Jim Schaad <i...@augustcellars.com><mailto:i...@augustcellars.com>; Mohit 
Sethi M <mohit.m.se...@ericsson.com><mailto:mohit.m.se...@ericsson.com>; 
draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guida...@ietf.org<mailto:draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guida...@ietf.org>
Cc: tls@ietf.org<mailto:tls@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [TLS] Review of draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance-00


Hi Jim,
On 7/6/20 7:06 PM, Jim Schaad wrote:





-----Original Message-----

From: Mohit Sethi M 
<mohit.m.se...@ericsson.com><mailto:mohit.m.se...@ericsson.com>

Sent: Monday, July 6, 2020 3:10 AM

To: Jim Schaad <i...@augustcellars.com><mailto:i...@augustcellars.com>; 
draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-

guida...@ietf.org<mailto:guida...@ietf.org>

Cc: tls@ietf.org<mailto:tls@ietf.org>

Subject: Re: Review of draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance-00



Hi Jim,



Thanks for the review. A clarifying question in-line.



On 7/2/20 12:02 AM, Jim Schaad wrote:

* In section 4 there is a statement that switching the roles of

servers which use PSKs will lead to weakening of security properties.

As this is a common scenario today in situations where you are doing

server-to-server communication, it would be useful to discuss just how

and how much this weakening occurs.  This was a complete surprise to

me and I don't know if it was supposed to be one.  Are there mitigations that

can be made?



* In section 7, The first sentence does not read, also It seems a bit

difficult to have a MUST in there when most of the items below are SHOULDs.

That seems to be a dissonance.



* Section 7.1.1 - The idea of having domain name suffixes on PSKs

seems to me to be a bad idea as this would seem to lower privacy levels.



I think you are referring to the PSK identity and not to the PSK.



As you know, the Network Access Identifiers (NAIs) used in EAP typically need

the domain name suffix for roaming, federation, etc.



This is true, it is also true that EAP is very strong on saying that if you 
have a choice, always send an anonymous version of the NAI if you have to do it 
in the clear.  This means that the domain can be used for correlation, but you 
do not have the full identity for that purpose.



I think that the EMU group is going to need to look at what level of privacy 
protection it is going to desire when using a PSK, but in that case there is no 
need for having  a domain suffix as that information is provided elsewhere.   
This might require keeping the TLS tunneling as an option to deal with passive 
attacks.

You are absolutely right about the preference for using anonymous identities. 
draft-ietf-emu-eap-tls13 currently says the following about resumption:

   It is RECOMMENDED to use a NAIs with the same realm in the resumption

   and the original full authentication.  This requirement allows EAP

   packets to be routable to the same destination as the original full

   authentication.  If this recommendation is not followed, resumption

   is likely to be impossible.  When NAI reuse can be done without

   privacy implications, it is RECOMMENDED to use the same anonymous NAI

   in the resumption, as was used in the original full authentication.

   E.g. the NAI @realm can safely be reused, while the NAI

   ZmxleG8=@realm cannot.
This document and the ensuing discussion pertains only to external PSKs and 
external PSK identities. I think I incorrectly used the word "issue" in my 
previous email as a more correct choice would have been "agree/establish" (i.e. 
the server and client agree on an external PSK and an external PSK identity). 
RFC 8446 doesn't place any restrictions on external PSK identities (other than 
the fact that they are at least 1 byte). If we are going to discourage the use 
of domain names in external PSK identities, would that be sufficient? What 
prevents me from using an external PSK identity of the type: 
my_strong_secret_psk_with_amazon_server?

I am not sure if we should recommend randomized external PSK identities of a 
certain minimum length. Perhaps it might be better to add a disclaimer about 
the privacy loss from carelessly chosen external PSK identities?

[JLS] There are going to be three different cases for external PSK identities: 
The identity if factory provisioned and carried in a file to the server,  the 
identity is factory provisioned and read by the user from the device, and it is 
hand chosen.  The first two cases can definitely be randomized.  I don’t know 
that having a minimum length makes any difference.  This is not exactly a 
cryptographic property.  Another thing that might be done would be analogous to 
the PSK importer document and apply a one way hash from the typed in value to 
the value that is sent over the wire so on the wire it is just a random set of 
bytes.

Jim



--Mohit









I would like to understand the nature of the resulting privacy loss. Is it that 
a

passive attacker can now easily determine the server which issued the PSK

identity (and the server where it will eventually be used)?



While it I true that at least some of the privacy information has already been 
leaked in the PSK case, you know the address that is being talked to and the 
PSK identity that is passed.  If you look at using thigs like ESNI, doing this 
would appear to potentially give away the very information that is being hidden 
in that case.



The other problem with having domain based KIDs is that you could easily get 
some amount of correlation between the KIDs that are assigned in different 
domains.  You could end up with mohit.ietf and mohit.amazon and it would be 
quite reasonable to assume that both of those identities are going to be for 
the same entity, just in different domains.



Jim







--Mohit





* Section 7.1.2 - There seem to me to be three different places where

collisions will occur.  The importer function could get a collision,

there could be collisions with pre-TLS 1.2 external identifiers and

there could be collision with resumption keys.  There has been a huge

discussion about this in the EMU group and I don't find the text here

to be sensible in term of whether this is or is not a problem.



* Section 7.1.2 - One of the things that I kept meaning to get to and

just haven't done so yet, is dealing with the question of can the TLS

Key binders in the handshake to distinguish between multiple keys that

happen to have the same identity.  Perhaps you should look to see if

this does work and if it is safe.



Jim







_______________________________________________

TLS mailing list

TLS@ietf.org<mailto:TLS@ietf.org>

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls



_______________________________________________
TLS mailing list
TLS@ietf.org<mailto:TLS@ietf.org>
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls

_______________________________________________
TLS mailing list
TLS@ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls

Reply via email to