On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 2:34 AM, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <n...@redhat.com> wrote:
> I agree that protecting the length of the communicated data is
> important, but there is nothing specific to this cipher. All modern TLS
> ciphers today are stream ciphers (i.e., AES-GCM and AES-CCM (*)), so
> they offer the same protection as chacha20 with respect to hiding the
> length. Maybe we should add a note about that in the security
> considerations.

I've added the following to the security considerations section in -02:

        It should be noted that AEADs, such as ChaCha20-Poly1305, are not
        intended to hide the lengths of plaintext. When this document speaks of
        side-channel attacks, it is not considering traffic analysis, but
        rather timing and cache side-channels. Traffic analysis, while a valid
        concern, is outside the scope of the AEAD and is being addressed
        elsewhere in future versions of TLS.


Cheers

AGL

-- 
Adam Langley a...@imperialviolet.org https://www.imperialviolet.org

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