[tor-dev] Analysis of the Relative Severity of Tagging Attacks

[Robert Ransom]

On 2012-03-12, Watson Ladd <watsonbladd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Robert Ransom <rransom.8774 at gmail.com>
> wrote:

>> But http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/bear-lion.pdf and an
>> end-to-end MAC is more likely as a solution to the end-to-end tagging
>> attack, because (a) per-hop MACs would take up much more space in each
>> cell and disclose the length of a circuit to the exit node, and (b)
>> with per-hop MACs, if you can get a forgery accepted (which happens
>> with probability 2^(-n), where n is the number of bits in the MAC, for
>> any MAC that Tor could use), you know with probability 2^(-n) that the
>> next hop is the last one.
> You are going to have to be careful and explain this to me. I get the
> leaking the length of a circuit and position in the chain. But we use
> length 3 circuits in the current client node all the time, and if you
> weren't the start or the end, you are the middle. The forgery
> acceptance probability for Poly1305 is 2^-128. Forgery is not going to
> happen.

Non-truncated Poly1305 takes 16 bytes per relay, so it would eat up at
least 48 bytes per 512-byte cell, and more on 4-hop circuits (which
Tor clients do build fairly often) and hidden-service rendezvous
circuits.  Non-truncated Poly1305 is not going to happen.


> I also don't see what Bear/Lionness gets us. It does solve problems
> with losing sync. It does so at a cost of determining when identical
> ORs are sent, which happens a lot: think multiple http requests.

What do you mean by "ORs"?

(The BEAR/LION key would likely be different for each cell that a
relay processes.)

> Losing semantic security is a Bad Thing. I'll freely admit there are
> issues with incorporating a leak of circuit length into the protocol,
> as well as possibly (depending on details of TLS) leaking what lengths
> end where to a global adversary.

An end-to-end MAC inside the BEAR/LION wrapper should provide all the
security properties we need (note that the MAC key would also need to
be different for each cell).


Robert Ransom