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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about why you're even trying to make this argument, Colin.

Because I'm an academic who believes in education and getting details right. And also because I don't want to have people panic unnecessarily.

Name a real system that uses H(m||k) that you trust. H(x||y) MAC schemes are a hallmark of DIY crypto, and DIY crypto systems are the ones that get broken first.

I wouldn't say that it's a hallmark of DIY crypto so much as it is a hallmark of not understanding crypto -- like advertising the use of AES-256 without mentioning the block cipher mode, or treating SSL as a silver bullet.

You're right that I wouldn't trust a system which used SHA256(m || k) as a MAC; but if I was hired to fix such a system, that would be the last thing I'd fix. I'd start by looking for the security flaws.

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H(m || k) was a construction that was used in the early 1990's. No protocol standards specified it after HMAC appeared in 1996. SHA256 appeared in 2002.

If you're using a 2002 heavyweight hash function with an early 1990's MAC construction, you are an idiot. I can use such strong words because no one does this. There are no standards anywhere that specified this exact construction because HMAC was invented long before SHA2. If anyone does this in some private toolkit, it's the perfect example why unreviewed, proprietary crypto designs are horrible.

However, the much more likely scenario if you use H(m || k) is that you're using MD5 (or possibly, but less likely, SHA-1). You have a legacy application that inherited an early 1990's design. This construction was specified for SNMP in 1991, for example.

So while you have a technical point, your argument is detrimental to real, deployed systems. I'm extremely concerned that your straw man argument based on SHA256-SecretSuffix, which is extremely unlikely to exist anywhere, would be taken as supporting MD5- or SHA1-SecretSuffix which I know exist in various toolkits. I've seen it when talking to some clients.

Can you make it clear that both MD5- and SHA1-SecretSuffix are not only cryptographically broken, but have feasible attacks with today's hardware?

In other words, for the people who are downmodding Nate because he used the word "idiot" and they don't know who he is because his karma score is 3 digits (and who are concurrently modding me and Colin up because our karma scores are 5 digits because we are losers):

No matter what Colin is saying, Nate has actually found systems that used SHA1(m||k) and MD5(m||k), and those systems are breakable with off-the-shelf hardware. Which is why he wrote this blog post we're commenting on.

Theory's nice, but Colin's theories are just theories, and in the harsh light of real-world experience, his explanations of those theories are misleading. No secure system uses H(m||k). And H(m||k) is exactly the kind of thing smart developers will come up with if you give them a hash function and say "make a MAC out of this".

So "zero" are the number of systems you trust that use hand-hacked H(m||k) MACs, and like Nate you agree that using a hand-hacked H(m||k) MAC is evidence of not understanding how MACs work.

I like how you picked two other examples of "bad crypto", one which is clearly an example of bad crypto (using AES and not knowing how to actually apply the function to real data), and the other of which is a personal crusade of yours and, in fact, an example of really good crypto. But you're an academic, and you're all about getting the details right. Right. ;)

I like how you picked two other examples of "bad crypto"...

I picked those just for you. :-)

the other of which is a personal crusade of yours and, in fact, an example of really good crypto

Treating anything as a silver bullet is a dumb thing to do. I only mentioned SSL because, well, it's something which is commonly used that way.

(I was originally going to use PGP as an example, but figured that you'd appreciate me using SSL instead.)

Edit:

I originally asked what's wrong with SSL, until I realized it's been replaced by TLS, so I guess there was something wrong with it.

But when you talked about the perils of relying on "SSL", did you mean precisely that, or is there a problem with TLS too?

There's nothing cryptographically wrong with SSL (TLS and SSL are mostly synonyms in modern systems that disallow SSLv1 and SSLv2). SSL is actually an example of a cryptosystem done very right, which has survived and adapted to 15+ years of attacks. If you read the protocol, you will see lots of places that seem clunky, and almost all of them are countermeasures to older attacks.

The fact that a protocol with the same objectives as SSL that you wrote today would be far simpler and more straightforward than SSL is evidence of how important it is to use SSL, because you are not going to think of all the attacks that people like Paul Kocher thought of when they reviewed and modified the protocol.

As Thomas said, I was treating "SSL" and "TLS" as synonyms.

There are two major problems with SSL:

1. It's very complex and has a lot of optional components an attacker can select. This means that (a) it's very likely that SSL implementations will have bugs; (b) it's very likely that those bugs won't be triggered in common use, and will thus tend to remain unfixed; and (c) if an attacker can find such a bug, he can probably trigger it.

2. It relies on a very large number of single points of failure -- namely, Certificate Authorities. CAs screw up all the time, and an attacker only needs to find one screwy CA in order to pretend to be whoever he wants.

In many situations SSL is the best option available; but that doesn't mean that it's a good option, only that it's the least bad option.

Thanks for the information!

Actually I think I've read something about the different levels of SSL. I suppose it's possible to somehow limit the available modes, to avoid exposing vulnerabilities.

an attacker only needs to find one screwy CA in order to pretend to be whoever he wants.

- What's a screwy CA, and how does the pretending work? .. If it's possible to describe roughly.

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