Re: HalfSipHash Acceptable Usage
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: 2016-12-20 21:37:03
Also in:
linux-crypto, lkml
On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 06:32:44PM +0100, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
1) Anything that requires actual long-term security will use SipHash2-4, with the 64-bit output and the 128-bit key. This includes things like TCP sequence numbers. This seems pretty uncontroversial to me. Seem okay to you?
Um, why do TCP sequence numbers need long-term security? So long as you rekey every 5 minutes or so, TCP sequence numbers don't need any more security than that, since even if you break the key used to generate initial sequence numbers seven a minute or two later, any pending TCP connections will have timed out long before. See the security analysis done in RFC 6528[1], where among other things, it points out why MD5 is acceptable with periodic rekeying, although there is the concern that this could break certain hueristics used when establishing new connections during the TIME-WAIT state. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6528 - Ted