[tor-dev] [proposal] Post-Quantum Secure Hybrid Handshake Based on NewHope

Deirdre Connolly durumcrustulum at gmail.com
Thu May 19 18:48:43 UTC 2016


Granted that this is an experimental implementation (as acknowleged by the
Boring devs) in a very different protocol with different tradeoffs.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 2:42 PM Yawning Angel <yawning at schwanenlied.me>
wrote:

> On Thu, 19 May 2016 17:21:47 +0000
> Deirdre Connolly <durumcrustulum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Not sure if this has been noted before on this thread, but the
> > BoringSSL team is working on something very similar:
> >
> > https://boringssl-review.googlesource.com/#/c/7962/
>
> Skimming the code:
>
>  * The protocol level stuff is not useful at all because the sort of
>    problems that need to be solved (or changes) with the Tor
>    wire protocol for any sort of PQ handshake are rather different than
>    "just adding another TLS key exchange mechanism".
>
>  * Their hybrid construct is unauthenticated (handled separately by TLS,
>    with a signature), and is `X25519SharedSecret | NHSharedSecret`,
>    passed into a KDF.
>
>  * They have their own special snowflake newhope variant (The code is
>    based on the `ref` version, with Google copyrights bolted on top),
>    functional changes are:
>
>     * CTR-AES128 instead of SHAKE is used to sample `a` (same
>       algorithm, doesn't have the sampling optimization or attempt to
>       hide the rejection sampling timing variation).
>
>     * SHA256 is used instead of SHA3-256 to generate `mu` from `nu`.
>
>     * RAND_bytes() is called for noise sampling instead of using
>       ChaCha20 or CTR-AES256.
>
>     I don't find these changes to be particularly interesting.  Any
>     system where using AES-CTR like this makes sense will benefit more
>     from using a vectorized NTT/reconciliation.
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Yawning Angel
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