On 26 mrt 2008, at 14:36, Eric Rescorla wrote:
- Modern cryptographic implementations are extremely fast. For
comparison the MacBook Air I'm typing this on will do order 10^6
HMAC-MD5s/second on 64-byte packets. So, to consume all my
resources would require order 10^8 bits per second, which is a
pretty serious packet-based DoS ittack on many contexts.
This is a bogus argument. Implementations are always inferior to
optimistic performance claims and although maybe your laptop CAN do
that that doesn't mean you WANT it to spend its cycles and battery
power on that. (Or maybe you do, but I certainly don't.)
- Even mounting this attack requires knowing both host/port
quartets. With DTLS, as with TLS, the responder/server's
port is typically known whereas the initiator/client's port
is random or pseudorandom. This creates some barrier to
mounting this attack.
The DTLS design to reuse the port numbers is not unreasonable as long
as DoS against CPU resources isn't a concern. But not using random
sequence numbers, like TCP has been doing since the dawn of time, is a
serious oversight because it costs next to nothing and buys a lot of
protection against spoofing attacks.
- A very similar attack is available on IKE (and DTLS, of
course). In order to block DoS attacks, both handshakes
offer the option of doing a "stateless cookie" exchange,
in which the responder gives the initiator a token which
can be used to verify the client's next message (which must
of course contain the token). But the way these tokens are
generates is to have the responder compute a cryptographic
MAC/hash over some input data. So an attacker can force
any random IKE or DTLS stack to do as many digest operations
as it wants.
That doesn't make sense. For such a cookie to provide additional
benefit over the normal HMAC, the value in the next message must be
present in that next message in the clear so the number of crypto
operations required is equal to the number of valid packets, which
isn't under the control of an attacker, rather than the total number
of packets (like a HMAC), which can be inflated by an attacker.
The part that I don't like about DTLS is the way it avoids dealing
with MTU issues and pretty much tells people to do PMTUD for IPv4 for
UDP even though in theory this is extremely hard to get to work and
practice it never works.
You've misunderstood the purpose of DTLS, which is to replicate
the semantics of UDP to the greatest extent possible, consistent
with also provided an association-based security system. Accordingly,
since UDP-based applications have to deal with PMTU, they have to
do so with DTLS as well.
I wasn't offering a critique of DTLS' purpose, but rather, of its
operation. Path MTU discovery for IPv4 for UDP can only work if
applications can adjust their packet sizes arbitrarily, which they
often can't, or at least not in a reasonable way. Perpetuating this
broken idea in DTLS was a mistake.
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