OK, let me try an extremely naïve approach.

Say, an adversary observes a ton of TLS traffic between A and B. Using approach 
that Watson and others outlined, he can now tell that this is not a truly 
random stream but a bunch of encrypted data. My question is, from practical 
real-world point of view - so what? (Of course, beyond the ability to publish a 
real paper that IND-* has been compromised :)

If there are practical consequences, like loss of confidentiality – I’m dying 
to hear the outline of a practical attack.
--
Regards,
Uri Blumenthal

From: TLS <tls-boun...@ietf.org<mailto:tls-boun...@ietf.org>> on behalf of 
"Dang, Quynh" <quynh.d...@nist.gov<mailto:quynh.d...@nist.gov>>
Date: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 at 07:21
To: Eric Rescorla <e...@rtfm.com<mailto:e...@rtfm.com>>, 
"tls@ietf.org<mailto:tls@ietf.org>" <tls@ietf.org<mailto:tls@ietf.org>>
Subject: Re: [TLS] Data volume limits


Hi Eric,


I explained the issue before and some other people recently explained it again 
on this thread. AES has 128-bit block. Therefore, when there are 2^64  or more 
ciphertext blocks, there are likely collisions among the ciphertext blocks (the 
collision probability increases rapidly when the number of ciphertext blocks 
increases above 2^64 ( 2^n/2 in generic term) ).


However, the only information the attacker can gain from ANY pair of collided 
ciphertext blocks is that their corresponding plaintext blocks are probably 
different ones because the chance for them to be the same is 1/2^128 (1/2^n in 
generic term) and this is NOT better than a random guess. So, you don't lose 
anything actually.


As a pseudorandom function, AES completely fails under any mode when the number 
of ciphertext blocks gets above 2^64.  When the counter is effectively only 64 
bits (instead of 96 bits as in TLS 1.3), the data complexity should be below 
2^32 blocks because the same input block and the same key can be repeated 2^32 
times to find a collision in the ciphertext blocks.  If you want a negligible 
collision probability, the number of data blocks should be way below 2^32 in 
this situation.


However, the confidentiality of the plaintext blocks is not lost at all as long 
as the counter number does not repeat.


Quynh.




________________________________
From: TLS <tls-boun...@ietf.org<mailto:tls-boun...@ietf.org>> on behalf of Eric 
Rescorla <e...@rtfm.com<mailto:e...@rtfm.com>>
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 6:17 AM
To: Simon Josefsson
Cc: tls@ietf.org<mailto:tls@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [TLS] Data volume limits



On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 12:44 AM, Simon Josefsson 
<si...@josefsson.org<mailto:si...@josefsson.org>> wrote:
Eric Rescorla <e...@rtfm.com<mailto:e...@rtfm.com>> writes:

> Watson kindly prepared some text that described the limits on what's safe
> for AES-GCM and restricting all algorithms with TLS 1.3 to that lower
> limit (2^{36} bytes), even though ChaCha doesn't have the same
> restriction.

Can we see a brief writeup explaining the 2^36 number?

I believe Watson provided one a while back at:
https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg18240.html

I don't like re-keying.  It is usually a sign that your primitives are
too weak and you are attempting to hide that fact.  To me, it is similar
to discard the first X byte of RC4 output.

To be clear: I would prefer not to rekey either, but the consensus at IETF 
Yokohama
was that we were close enough to the limit that we probably had to. Would be
happy to learn that we didn't.

-Ekr



If AES-GCM cannot provide confidentiality beyond 64GB (which would
surprise me somewhat), I believe we ought to be careful about
recommending it.

Of course, the devil is in the details: if the risk is that the secret
key is leaked, that's fatal; if the risk is that the attacker can tell
whether two particular plaintext 128 byte blocks are the same or not in
the entire file, that can be a risk we can live with (similar to the
discard X bytes of RC4 fix).

I believe 64GB is within the range that people download in a web browser
these days.  More data intensive longer-running protocols often transfer
significantly more.

/Simon

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