Except not for the reason the author thinks.
There are several problems here.
First, with SHA-1 for example, you have 64 bytes per chunk. That means you basically get a free ride on this problem for anything < 64 bytes. A lot of "application state" fits pretty well in 64 bytes.
Secondly, unless a message ends right on the 64 byte boundary, it is not nearly that simple. You have a bit of a problem, because the hash is padded, and when you add extra characters to your original string, that padding gets replaced with those values. So, it's no longer simple to just "keep going" from where you stopped.
Still, you can see how that leaves a distinct subset of cases where you'd be exposed. SHA-1, along with most secure hash functions, appends the length of the message the end of the source text before performing the hash function. That means that if you add even one byte to the string, you have now changed the last 8 bytes that were fed in to the "original" hash function. Oh, and your extra byte goes in before those bytes, so not only did you change those 8 bytes, but you shifted them down a byte.
So, no, it isn't nearly that easy to crack a SHA-1 based authentication, and yet, it is easy enough that you should totally NOT use them for authentication and instead use HMAC ; they are vulnerable to extension attacks, it's just not nearly as easy as this article suggests, and conclusions one might draw from this article (like you can solve this problem by feeding all source text in to the hash algorithm backwards) are likely ill founded.
It just turns out that cryptography is way more complicated, and even in terms of understanding weaknesses that arise from doing things wrong, you are going to get it wrong. Trust the experts, when they say it is a bad idea, but don't assume why it is a bad idea can be explained in a short blog article like this.
UPDATED: Added an explanation as to why it might be dangerous to just take this article at its word.
In practice, length-extendable SHA-1 MAC functions are mechanically exploitable; they'll be discovered quickly by competent attackers who don't even have access to your source code, because attempts to break them require very little code and even less time.
It is a very, very bad idea to put off fixing a problem like this because you've been led to believe by someone on a message board that MD padding is going to be an obstacle to attackers. It isn't. The Flickr MAC break required MD padding, too; Thai and Juliano broke it just the same.
Let's be clear about what an HMAC is. It's pretty much what this article describes, but executed with a specific protocol that avoids exploitable weaknesses in naive approaches.
It is literally:
first_pad = a_constant_block ^ key
second_pad = another_constant_block ^ key
hash(second_pad + hash(first_pad + message))
> In practice, attackers just guess the bit length of the message by writing the Ruby script that generates the 100 candidate messages at different expected bit lengths and feeding them to their fuzzer. The bit length issue is not a real one in practice.
You're closer to addressing the real complexity involved in cracking it than the original article. I agree that in principle it isn't hard to break a naive hash-based digest authentication. I'm merely pointing out that it isn't simple.
Also... not sure why they'd have to use Ruby or why that is relevant...
> It is a very, very bad idea to put off fixing a problem like this because you've been led to believe by someone on a message board that MD padding is going to be an obstacle to attackers.
No. It's a very, very bad idea to ever go down this road in the first place. Start with a MAC. If you think you can be more clever than the collective expertise of the field, study cryptography and prove it, but until you've finished studying it, do what they say. History is littered with people who thought they knew just enough about cryptography that they could do things their own way without consequences (WEP anyone?).
In general I'm all for encouraging amateurs to compete with the pros, but cryptography is definitely one of those fields where it can appear deceptively simple to achieve your goals, and it totally, totally, totally is not.
First, this may send the wrong message to the less-focused reader: "what, I should use block ciphers instead?". Luckily, HMAC is eventually brought up, which is a fine solution.
HMAC requires 2 calls to H, our favorite hash function. Certain applications may find the overhead to be prohibitively high. With non-broken hash functions (e.g., any of the SHA-3 finalists), we can use the so-called envelope authenticator: A = H(K||M||K), with some padding to separate K from M to keep security proofs happy. This is significantly faster for short messages, and short is the most common size out there.
I think it is safe to say that you are suggesting a very narrow context. If invoking a hash twice is prohibitive and you are looking at choosing amongst SHA-3 finalists as an alternative (particularly given that many of them are slower than SHA-2, and I believe they are all slower than SHA-1 on low cost CPU's where you might expect this constraint), you are already talking about a very narrow performance window (literally one iteration of Moore's Law covers the gap). You then throw in that people are making refined selection of hash algorithms taking in to account various security nuances, and I think you are dealing not only with a narrow context, but a degree of cryptographic expertise that you don't have to worry that anyone solving it would be consulting this blog or Hacker News in general. ;-)
If the reader can't be bothered to read the article to the end, I hardly think it reflects on the author. Whilst it might indeed be a more concise article if it just said "don't use a hash function for message authentication, use HMAC", it would still miss the important final point about timing attacks, not to mention the journey of explanation about why you shouldn't just use a hash function.
Point being, although hash functions might work most of the time, their general construction does not make them safe for this purpose. You can't say something is 'mostly secure' because it works 'most of the time'. The times is doesn't work will affect someone, and for them the system is not secure at all.
Plus, implementations with weird edge cases make for horrible debugging, especially when it comes to security.
I'm with you except for: "a useless diversion".
From the description in your article, I might think that if I have really short messages, I'm okay. I might think that if I reversed my strings, so any additional state is prepended instead of appended, I'd be okay. I might think that if I truncate my hashes (say, used the first 256 bits of SHA-512), I'd be okay. I'd be really, really wrong.
> Point being, although hash functions might work most of the time, their general construction does not make them safe for this purpose. You can't say something is 'mostly secure' because it works 'most of the time'. The times is doesn't work will affect someone, and for them the system is not secure at all.
That's the wrong point though. It's not that hash functions "might work most of the time". Uncompromised secure hash functions work all of the time for their intended purpose. For this other purpose, they work exactly none of the time.
The aspects I described that might make you think SHA-1 actually has this covered except for a few corner cases are trivial challenges for an attacker to overcome, as are all of the above "remedies" I mentioned (all of which resemble idiot moves that have in fact been made by naive developers who thought they could be clever and save themselves... I don't know.. maybe some CPU time?).
I do think the post was some great writing that illustrated an idea quite clearly. I think it could be quite informative for a lot of people. I just think what you wrote would benefit from being framed appropriately. I'd suggest a preface... something like, "HMAC's were invented to address the fact that you can't just use a hash for authentication. Somehow people miss this point, possibly because HMAC's seem like a trivial layer on top of a secure hash. In practice, there are a surprising variety of issues. To give you an idea of the kinds of problems you might run in to, and hopefully a sense that you can't just naively tweak your use of a hash to address them, I'm going to simplify a common problem with using secure hashes for authentication that has probably never occurred to you. I assure you that this problem is actually more complex, and there are many more problems."
Here's what their documentation says:
Language Standard Syntax for Generating MD5 Hash Java import org.apache.commons.codec.digest.*; hash = DigestUtils.md5Hex(string1+string2+string3...); PHP $hash = md5($string1.$string2.$string3...); Ruby require 'digest/md5' hash = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(string1+string2+string3...) Python import md5 hash = md5.new(string1+string2+string3...)
PS, maybe more developers should take an intro course on crypto.
What kind of timing attack is that? In order for there to be a timing attack, there has to be a difference in the timings.
1. You can either process the data, check the authentication code, then commit.
2. Or you can check the authentication code, process the data, then commit.
I don't see any attacks on #2 that couldn't also work on #1.
The only good thing that "authenticating last" does is that it prevents the attacker from issuing lots of requests sequentially, thus brute-forcing your authentication, but this should be solved in another way, without slowing down legitimate users and overloading your servers.
Success: check authentication, process data, commit, return 2xx status.
Failure: check authentication, return 4xx status.
The reason that you don't get any information from the difference in timing between the two branches is because you already get that information from the status code.
Now on the other hand, if you use naive string comparison, different failure branches will take different amounts of time. That is a security hole, and it's not what we're talking about here.
There are many ways to fail with cryptography and avoiding them all takes considerable expertise. Using crypto libraries does not solve this problem.
The class repeats starting Monday, if anyone is interested in learning the basics of how all this stuff works.
As an analogy, you should never use a hammer to put in screws. That's not linkbait just because you have a tool that's a hammer on one end and a screwdriver on the other end.
If you don't happen to like my kids, well, first, screw you, and secondly: buy _Practical Cryptography_ or _Cryptography Engineering_ (really the same book) and burn your copy of "Applied".
Wouldn't this attack be eliminated by using iptables rate limiting to reduce the attack window of opportunity?
The reality is that you probably can dick around with things in your deployment and your app to make timing attacks prohibitively expensive/annoying; if you understand that you're not eliminating the timing leak, but rather masking it, you can take advantage of the additional measurements required to unmask the leak to give your MAC enough of a buffer to last for its whole useful lifetime.
But when you do this, you're really playing on the razor's edge of what we currently know about side channel attacks on crypto, and you're probably going to end up putting more effort into your workaround than you would in just fixing the underlying bug.
Better to have resistance as baked into your crypto as you can, rather than relying on a firewall further up the stack. If the data itself is resilient, no implementation will be able to defeat it efficiently.
This assumes that 1: you can reliably measure at that small of a time difference and 2: you can submit enough requests without being detected.
If you're wondering, "how do I detect nanosecond differences over a network when my measurement will be swamped by other things happening on the target, the network, and my host", the answers boil down to:
* You're going to move your measurement code as close to the drivers as possible, and fix interrupt handling so that interrupts don't confound your measurements.
* You're going to get yourself on the same hosting provider as your target; for instance, a good chunk of all target apps can be attacked via Amazon EC2 for not very much money.
* You're going to take lots and lots and lots and lots of measurements and then use high school statistics to process the results.
Is this really the best way to compare strings without giving away timing info?
If you do that in a language with an optimizing compiler or JIT runtime you'd better look at the generated code and/or do your own timing measurements. A sufficiently-smart optimizer could recognize that the first difference encountered allows for early loop termination.
I see how the xor method works, but not why it's superior.
Also, it would seem that you'd be leaking information about the size of the other string with either method (whether you exit early or not when you run past the length of one of the strings) - not a problem when comparing hashes presumably, but is it never a concern?
I don't think you'd be leaking that information if you hashed both strings and compared the hash, because it wouldn't stop getting faster when the shorter string gets shorter.
This is just one of the easier ways. It's effective and easy to code.
The article says:
"This sequence is then folded using a compression function h(). The details of the h() depend on the hashing function, but the only thing that concerns us here is that the compression function takes two message blocks and returns another block of the same size."
So if the chunks in a SHA-1 hash are 512 bits each then surely the output of the hash function would be 512 bits rather than the 160 bit digest?
Edit: the IV is 160 bits , so "another block of the same size" means each derivative block is the size of the IV not of the actual data.
The Handbook of Applied Cryptography, Chapter 9 (free online: http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/) nicely explains the reasons.
How would you extend that?
Your hash construction will pad out your data to be multiples of the right size. That padding can be verified in some way - often it is all nulls, or encodes the length of the message. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%E2%80%93Damg%C3%A5rd_con...
Is the timing attack hardening suggested in the blog post a standard approach?
If I was trying to attack a system and knew loosely that they did what he suggested (hashing then comparing vs comparing with timing exposed) , my untrained instinct would be that this is the weakest part. In other words I think this just makes the timing attack a little more difficult, but still possible, by producing specific hashes that carry out the timing attack.
When I've needed to harden comparisons against timing attacks, I've always just used constant time comparison functions, such as these ->
http://codahale.com/a-lesson-in-timing-attacks/ http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/07/timing-independent-array-co...
Jitter and confounding are problems that can be addressed simply by repeated measurements.
The rule-of-thumb from Crosby & Wallach's paper on remote timing attacks is, assume tens-to-hundreds of nanoseconds precision if you can colocate the attacker at the same provider, and tens of microseconds if you have to do it over the Internet.
that's not an intelligent attitude.
understanding where an edge case breaks down is still illuminating, regardless of whether i use hmac in the end.
There are two reasons to ask the question.
The first reason is because the questioner is looking for an excuse to use something different. In this case, your answer is the right answer.
The second reason is because the questioner wants to learn more about how cryptography works, for educational value. In this case, your answer is not helpful.