[tor-dev] GSoC: Tor Messenger CONIKS integration

Tue Mar 8 19:57:15 UTC 2016

Hi Elias! 

Nice to meet you and thanks for your interest in this GSOC project! I’m Marcela, a mentor on this project as well. I was the main author on the CONIKS paper, so I can answer all of your paper-related questions. From some of the terminology you’re using and from some of the text you’ve quoted, it seems to me that you’ve been reading an older version of the paper, so I would refer you to our most recent and peer-reviewed paper published at USENIX Security 2015: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~melara/static/pubs/sec15-paper-melara.pdf

I hope my explanations make sense, and please let us know if you have more questions!

Best,
Marcela

>> That's correct, though perhaps the project description
>> should emphasize that the priority is on the server and
>> client components.
>> 
> Ok. The CONIKS paper proposes that an identity provider A publishes its commitments to others and then the user can then query  multiple identity providers if they all have the same picture of A's commitment.
> So, the functionality of auditing commitments would be a subset of the server anyhow, I guess then the auditors could also just use the server component which was configured to act only as an auditor?!

Yes, we propose that the identity providers can act as auditors and cross-verify each other in this way, and clients may query any auditor when they are checking for equivocation. However, I should note that we intended this to be the *ideal deployment* (and I apologize if this doesn’t come through clearly enough in the paper). CONIKS also allows third-party auditors whose sole job it is to check that the chain of signed tree roots is linear. In practice, we expect that auditors and identity providers will be separate in most cases (at least until there is a standard for CONIKS protocols and data formats, but we’re not there yet). 

It’s not accurate to conflate auditing with being a key server, or say that auditing is a subset of the key server’s functionality. Auditors only need to keep records of identity providers’ signed tree roots, and they never download or record any key directory contents, so it doesn’t really make sense to equip auditors with key server functionality and “turn it off” when you’re not acting as a key server.  Key servers have the more complex and rich functionality needing to maintain significantly larger data structures and perform more cryptographic computations. This means that key servers have very different space and availability requirements than auditors do.

>> While I agree that would probably ease deployment
>> for those running ejabberd, it's not very helpful
>> in the general case. We'd like anyone to be able to
>> run an auditor. And, again, I should stress that the
>> other components are the priority and should make up the
>> bulk of the work.
>> 
> I see your point. As stated above: I'd try to design the server so it can be configured to only act as an auditor.

See my point above. Auditing and maintaining keys isn’t just about configuring a server differently.

>> Sounds great. Again, thanks for your interest
>> in the project. Feel free to ping Marcela (masomel)
>> and I (arlolra) on irc in tor-dev
>> 
> Ok, thanks a lot, I will!
> Two questions came up in the last days:
> 
> 1. How would the CONIKS client code integrate with the ctypes-otr add-on? It would probably be part of it? So should I also have a look to implement client functionality in a C library and then use the calls via types?

Arlo may have a better answer to this question.

> 2. While reading the paper I had some confusion about a minor point, namely about the way CONIKS calculates the index of a user identity in the merkle prefix tree. I know you neither wrote the paper nor the reference implementation, but maybe you can shed some light onto this issue, even if it is probably a very small one.

How the lookup index is calculated is actually not a minor point. It’s pretty important that this is done in a very specific way to ensure that authentication paths in the CONIKS Merkle tree can’t allow an adversary to easily determine which other usernames have key mappings in the tree. This is one of the main privacy feature of CONIKS.

> On Page 4 the authors state:
> "We can implement a VUF using any deterministic, existentially unforgeable signature scheme [42]. The signature scheme must be deterministic or else (in our application) the identity provider could insert multiple bindings for a user at different locations each with a valid authentication path. In practice, this could be a classic RSA signature [51] (using a deterministic padding scheme such as PKCS v. 1.5 [26]) or BLS “short signatures” [9], which provide the best space efficiency. Many common discrete-log based signature schemes such as DSA [30] are not immediately applicable as they require a random nonce.
> In CONIKS, we generate the index for a user u as: i = h (sign_K (u))
> where h() is a one-way hash function and sign() is a deterministic, existentially unforgeable signature scheme. The extra hash function is added because some bits of sign_K (u) might otherwise leak through binding validity proofs, and signature schemes are generally not unforgeable given some bits of the valid signature. The hash function prevents this by ensuring the final lookup index leaks no information about the value of sign_K (u).”
> 
> I understand that using the signature of the user identity ensures that no information indicating its existence on the server is leaked. But why are they hashing the signature again? RSA-signatures normally already consist of a signed hash-value. Why would it bad to leak bits of the signature?

The answer to this question is in the portion of the paper you quote: "signature schemes are generally not unforgeable given some bits of the valid signature.” There’s some crypto-jargon here, which you may not be familiar with if you haven't taken a crypto course. What this sentence is trying to say is that, given some bits of a valid signature, an adversary could be able to find some message or data and a corresponding digital signature which is valid and which has not been generated by the legitimate signer (in this case the identity provider). This is called an existential forgery, and it means that an adversary can create forged lookup indices if the signature isn’t hashed. The hash on top of the signature also ensures that the lookup index can’t be easily computed from the VUF.

> Also, if I see this correctly, they don't do it in their reference implementation (https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-ref-implementation/blob/master/coniks_server/src/org/coniks/coniks_server/SignatureOps.java <https://github.com/coniks-sys/coniks-ref-implementation/blob/master/coniks_server/src/org/coniks/coniks_server/SignatureOps.java>), instead they just use SHA256withRSA...
> So, am I misreading the paper? Or do they actually mean sign_K(h(u)), which would be the normal 'hash and sign' operation of RSA? Or does it make sense to rehash the signature and their own implementation is not consistent with it?
> This is probably no important point, however I want to make sure I'm not missing a piece concerning the security of the user identities.

Unfortunately, the reference implementation is still a work in progress (although I’ve had to take some time off from working on it due to other research projects), and is missing several features described in the paper. The SignatureOps class in the reference implementation simply implements wrappers around Java signature functions, so that’s not where the user lookup index calculation happens. The lookup index calculation happens in the unameToIndex() function in conks_server.ServerUtils. Now, I will note that the reference implementation currently *isn’t* doing the proper index calculation as it only currently hashes the username, so thank you for making me go back and double-check my code! But it would be relative straight-forward to change this and to add the digital signature computation that needs to be done before the hashing. 

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