David,

We tried to address that with Petri's original by proposal:

Re-using public Diffie-Hellman keys has known security issues. If a future version of this protocol is considered, we strongly recommend that these issues are re-considered with due diligence. Especially, the current design allows hosts to become potentially more vulnerable to a low-probability problem during attacks than what they are if no attack is taking place may; whether this is acceptable or not should be reconsidered in the light of experimentation experiences.

Perhaps that should textually bound more strongly to the I1 storm issue?

--Pekka


On 20 Dec 2006, at 17:13, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Pekka and Petri,

In the proposed changes, I don't see a response to this concern:

The current text says
that DH values SHOULD not be reused unless the system is under
attack
(I1 storms), in which case they MAY be reused.  This appears to
drop
the level of security in response to an attack, which may not be
the
best course of action.

Thanks,
--David

-----Original Message-----
From: Pekka Nikander [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 7:56 AM
To: Petri Jokela
Cc: Black, David; [email protected]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Gen-ART HIP drafts (base and esp) review

Petri,

The text in Section 5.3.2 on Diffie-Hellman value reuse could use
some clarification.  The underlying issue is that the HIP exchange
does not use  the nonces that IKE and IKEv2 use, which makes DH
value reuse significantly more dangerous.  The current text says
that DH values SHOULD not be reused unless the system is
under attack
(I1 storms), in which case they MAY be reused.  This
appears to drop
the level of security in response to an attack, which may
not be the
best course of action.  I don't want to say that HIP ought to use
IKE-like nonces, but this text appears to need some more thought.
Section 5.3.3 doesn't discuss DH value reuse.  It should.

We discussed this and decided to add a note about the issue and a
strong recommendation that in the future versions of HIP this is
revisited:

   Re-using D-H value can open security holes.  When future
   versions of HIP are specified, it is strongly recommended
   that these possible security issues are investigated.

I'd rather say

"Re-using public Diffie-Hellman keys has known security
issues.  If a
future version of this protocol is considered, we strongly recommend
that these issues are re-considered with due diligence.  Especially,
the current design allows hosts to become potentially more
vulnerable
to a low-probability problem during attacks than what they are if no
attack is taking place may; whether this is acceptable or not should
be reconsidered in the light of experimentation experiences."

or something like that.

What you now write gives the feeling that we say "this is
broken.  go
fix it next time."  while we want to say "what we now do has known
limitations.  next time, consider if it is worth fixing, based on
your experience."

--Pekka






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