[tahoe-dev] proposal: add padding

Iraklis . leontiad at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 17:01:22 UTC 2013


There is an update on dedup coming as an ideal solution :
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/192518/dedup.pdf
Apart from theorems and security definitions it proposes
randomized tags + randomized ciphertext + dedup.

Regards,

Iraklis


On 07/12/2013 06:31 PM, Zooko O'Whielacronx wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
>> So I think before we add padding as a non-experimental features, we need
>>
>>    a paper analyzing the block-level-crypto vs encrypted files trade
>>    space, and discussing the understand-file-size threat model
> I hope such a paper comes out soon, but I kind of think this is at the
> forefront of security or crypto research, so it is quite possible that
> another decade may pass before the academic publication gatekeepers
> begin to care about these issues. If that's the way it is going to go,
> I don't want to be waiting for that before adding protection for our
> users.
>
> The two recent examples that seem relevant to me are the CRIME attack
> by Rizzo and Duong (not published in a peer-reviewed paper AFAIK) and
> the "Message-Locked Encryption" paper by Ristenpart et al.:
>
> http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/631
>
>>    a discussion of the threat model.  While it's easy to say "it would be
>>    nice if an attacker couldn't understand file structure", if we really
>>    mean "someone should not be able to guess if you are storing MP3s",
>>    that's something else, and not fixed by padding to multiple of 512
>>    bytes.
> That's a good point. It related to something that someone said in
> response to this on twitter… Let's see…
>
> Bah, I can't find it, but someone pointed out that if someone uploads
> many different files that are the same size, an observer would be able
> to deduce that they are all the same size, and what size they are,
> from the distribution of padded-sizes.
>
> Please also see the comments left by nickm on the ticket. Nickm is a
> lead developer on Tor and has been studying and working on closely
> related problems for many years now. I have a high estimation of his
> opinions on such things.
>
> https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/2018# padding to hide
> the size of plaintexts
>
> See also comments from Marsh Ray, who is also a pro. (Marsh is one of
> the few people who can put on their c.v. that they found a critical
> security flaw in SSL.)
>
>> Alternatively, one could look at things like bup, which do splitting based on rolling checksums and hash-level dedup.  By using bup and storing in tahoe, one probably gets most of the desired properties.
> Yes, this is very interesting! I think there's potentially a lot of
> value to be gained from this. Hm, actually I'm going to reply to this
> in a separate reply.
>
> Regards,
>
> Zooko
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