[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Advantages and disadvantages of using CB64 type of identifiers



Hi Christian,

El 02/07/2004, a las 19:21, Christian Huitema escribió:

My understanding is that SeND chose different IIDs for different
prefixes
but that might be overkill. If the IID is not a function of the prefix
it would enable redirection by a resourceful attacker
by precomputing 2^64 public/private keys that hash to all 2^64 IIDs.
If the content of the packets are encrypted the redirection would not
provide access to the content; it could only be used for DoS or for
gathering the content for cryptoanalysis.

There are two issues: catalog attacks and privacy implications. I have
already expressed my reservations about the privacy effects of having
unique identifiers in addresses. I would certainly not recommend that my
company ships anything like that.



i don't fully understand why do you think that having an identifier in the address is worse than current IPv4 situation (where the id and locator are one, and multihomed sites have a single address) or the current IPv6 situation (i guess that something similar to privacy extensions could be achieved by periodically creating new keys hence new identifiers)


A while back Jari Arkko computed the amount of space needed to store
2^64 precomputed keys, and the storage space was a few buildings the
size
of the former world trade center buildings I think.

You do not need to compute 2^64 keys to start having an effect. Suppose
that there are N users in the system, and that the bad guys have
computed a catalog of M keys. The average number of hits that a catalog
of size N will achieve is approximately NxM/2^64. There are currently at
least 500M Internet users, it is reasonable to expect some growth, so we
can set N to about 1 billion -- 2^30. This means you need M=2^34 to get
at least one hit.

Yes but how useful would this single hit be?
i mean this hit is likely to correspond with an identifier of an unknown host.
i guess that an attacker would be interested in knowing the identifier of a specific victim, right?


perhaps we need (at least i need) to understand the potential attacks a bit more...

 That is probably less than a Terabyte of data, i.e.
pretty soon a single hard disk.

Everybody should be convinced that, when it comes to cryptography, 2^64
is actually a small number. SEND alleviates this risk by
cryptographically link a public key to the entire 128 bits of the
address. This is NOT overkill.

i still don't have an opinion about this being an overkill or not.


regards, marcelo


-- Christian Huitema