On Monday 30 November 2015 10:58:48 Bryan A Ford wrote:
> On 11/30/15 2:40 AM, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> > Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <n...@redhat.com> writes:
> >> I believe your proposal is a nice example of putting the cart
> >> before the horse. Before proposing something it should be clear
> >> what do you want to protect from, what is the threat?
> >
> > Exactly. If you want to thwart traffic analysis, you need to do
> > something like what's done by designs like Aqua ("Towards Efficient
> > Traffic-analysis Resistant Anonymity Networks"), or ideas from any
> > of the other anti-traffic- analysis work that's emerged in the past
> > decade or two.
>
> I'm well aware of Aqua and "the other anti-traffic-analysis work
> that's emerged in the past decade or two": in fact I led one of the
> major recent systematic projects in that space. See for example:
>
> http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/
> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/10/192387-seeking-anonymity-in-an->
> internet-panopticon/fulltext
> > You get traffic
> > analysis resistance by, for example, breaking data into fixed-length
> > packets, using cover traffic, and messing with packet timings, not
> > by
> > encrypting TLS headers.
>
> Packet padding and header encryption are both important, complementary
> security measures: you get security benefits from each that you don't
> get from the other. Yes, you need padding to obtain systematic
> protection from traffic analysis - when for whatever reason not all
> implementations are always padding to the exact same standardized
> record length, header encryption makes padded streams less trivially
> distinguishable from unpadded streams, and makes streams with
> different record sizes less trivially distinguishable from each
> other.the header contains only one piece of information, and it is public already - the amount of data transmitted* If you want to hide how much data was transmitted, you need to establish a tunnel that transmits data constantly, at the exact same rate for the whole duration of connection. that means that you need to know a). what bandwidth the client has, b). what bandwidth the server can spare and c). how much data the user wants to get or send to the server (I really don't want to transmit 1GiB of data over a 100KiB/s stream if I have a 100Mbps link...). this goes well past the TLS WG charter, if only because it requires very close cooperation with the application layer so while the padding mechanism should be there, we really can't describe how it needs to be used, as it can't be made universal nor is it necessary for all use cases * - sure, the record layer boundaries can tell something about the data being transmitted, but so can the presence of data transmission taking place in the first place (think of a station sending reports only when it detects something while keeping connection open the whole time) > One thing that would greatly help Tor and all similar, > padded protocols is if they could "blend in" even just a little bit > better with the vast bulk of ordinary TLS-encrypted Web traffic, and > that's one of the big opportunities we're talking about here. the initial message in handshake in TLS MUST stay the same thus it is impossible to make it look like Tor. Not to thwart the Pervasive Monitoring threat of TLA agencies. > If you think it is practical for the TLS 1.3 standard to specify a > single, fixed record size that all implementations of TLS 1.3 must use > (i.e., explicitly freeze not only the version field but the length > field), then that would be great for traffic analysis protection and > on that basis I would support that proposal. But that frankly seems > to me likely a bit too much to ask given the diversity of TLS > implementations and use-cases. Tell me if you believe otherwise. That will just round up to a multiple of 256 bytes the data sizes transmitted. Hardly an improvement over the current 16 byte blocks. -- Regards, Hubert Kario Senior Quality Engineer, QE BaseOS Security team Web: www.cz.redhat.com Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkyňova 99/71, 612 45, Brno, Czech Republic
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