[tor-bugs] #14038 [Pluggable transport]: Fix ScrambleSuit's replay protection
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki
blackhole at torproject.org
Sun Dec 28 16:36:35 UTC 2014
#14038: Fix ScrambleSuit's replay protection
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Reporter: phw | Owner: asn
Type: defect | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone:
Component: Pluggable transport | Version:
Keywords: scramblesuit | Actual Points:
Parent ID: | Points:
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ScrambleSuit uses Uniform Diffie-Hellman as one of its authentication
mechanisms. To defend against replay attacks, a sever caches the HMAC of
a client's authentication message.
The attack works as follows. In the first step, an active adversary
(e.g., a censor trying to detect ScrambleSuit) observes a client
authenticate successfully towards a ScrambleSuit server and captures the
server's Uniform Diffie-Hellman response. In the second step, the
adversary replays the captured response to the very same server. Since
the server did not cache the HMAC of its own response, it will interpret
the replayed data as legitimate authentication message of a new client and
respond with an authentication response. The adversary now successfully
tricked the server into responding despite not knowing the shared secret.
This creates a noteworthy distinguisher which can help identifying
ScrambleSuit.
Luckily, it's easy to fix this problem. Introducing message types would
be one option but it would break backwards compatibility. The easiest fix
which retains backwards compatibility is to make the server also cache its
own HMACs which are part of the response to a client's authentication
message. The downside is that it doubles the size of the replay table but
that's tolerable.
Note that obfs4 is not affected by this problem because a client's and a
server's authentication message are different.
A patch follows in a minute.
--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14038>
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