On Jan 9, 2008, at 3:07 AM, Darren J Moffat wrote:

> For the case where we generate the master wrapping key (for datasets
> using a key wrapped by the pool key [keystype=pool]) from a passphrase
> using PKCS#5 we have to pick the size of the resulting key.  I've
> decided that I see no reason for it not to be an AES 256 bit key.
>
> However for the case where the wrapping key comes from a file (or  
> passed
> in via the private libzfs.so API from some other source) we could  
> allow
> it to be any of 128, 192, 256.  However I think that makes things  
> overly
> complex.  Since it allows us to get into a situation where an AES 256
> bit bulk key used for encrypting data is wrapped by an AES 128 bit
> wrapping key.  That feels wrong - it technically works but it feels  
> wrong.
>
> There are couple of options here:
>
> 1) Don't allow encrypted datasets with key lengths greater than that  
> of
> the wrapping key.   This seems safe from a security view but adds a
> significant amount of complexity to the code but more importanly it
> makes key change have to deal with more cases, in particular what if  
> the
> new key is smaller than the old one (obvious answer disallow it -  
> but we
> would still have to check).
>
> 2) Require that the pool level wrapping key must be AES 256 bit when
> stored in a file or passed in via the (private) API.
>
> Unless I hear strong objection with justification I'm going with  
> option
> 2 since it means that we always use an AES 256 bit wrapping key.

Works for me.

> At the moment the wrapping key must be an AES key but that may not
> always be the case, we can deal with the issues of other wrapping
> algorithms/key types when they come up.
>
>
> For those that are about to point out that AES 256 bit isn't always
> available in Solaris because of the SUNWcry/SUNWcryr packages that  
> will
> be resolved very soon (the changes are in final codereview and testing
> now and integration of it is a hard dependency for ZFS crypto anyway).
>
> -- 
> Darren J Moffat
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> zfs-crypto-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-crypto-discuss


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