On Apr 29, 2009, at 11:51 AM, Nathan wrote:

http://eurocrypt2009rump.cr.yp.to/837a0a8086fa6ca714249409ddfae43d.pdf

Wow! These slides say that they discovered a way to find collisions in SHA-1 at a cost of only 2^52 computations. If this turns out to be right (and the authors are respected cryptographers -- the kind of people who really hate to be wrong about something like this) then it is very exciting! SHA-1 was already known to be vulnerable to attack by a moderately well-funded organization such as a national security agency, national military, corporation, or organized criminal group. Now it turns out that finding SHA-1 collisions is in the reach of a dedicated hobbyist or an eccentric genius [1]. Let's put a rough number on it. I might be a little bit off, but you can build a COPACOBANA machine for about $10,000 [2], and it can brute-force a 56- bit DES key in about six and a half days. 2^52 SHA-1 operations should take roughly the same amount of time and money. As another example I guess that distributed computation engines [3] and botnets [4] might be able to generate a SHA-1 collision in seconds. Plus of course the amplifying effects of birthday attacks and rainbow tables and so on mean that the longer you keep your COPACOBANA or your botnet generating SHA-1 collisions, the more SHA-1 users around the world become vulnerable to you. So basically, if these slides are right then relying on SHA-1 collision-resistance has been revealed as a major vulnerability! Almost all hash functions in civilian, open use are either MD5 or SHA-1. For example, decentralized revision control tools such as monotone, git, and hg rely on SHA-1. Interesting times! As Shawn already correctly pointed out (and as Nathan probably already knew), Tahoe doesn't use SHA-1, so we're not affected by this new discovery. Tahoe-LAFS uses SHA-256 (in the "double-hashing" mode suggested by Ferguson and Schneier and named "SHA-256d"). We also add our own tagging and salting prefix to avoid certain problems. We aren't currently vulnerable to hash collision attacks, and we plan never to get into that position (about which more below). Nonetheless, it would be a very good exercise to spell out what sorts of problems could result if attackers could violate what sorts of properties of the hash function(s) used in Tahoe. The basic uses of secure hashes in Tahoe are for integrity-checking of immutable files and for digital signatures on mutable files and directories. If an attacker could generate two different inputs which yielded the same hash output (that is, to find a "hash collision"), then they could give you a single immutable file cap that produced two (or more) different files when you used it to download the file. We believe that nobody is currently able to do that, so currently if someone gives you an immutable file cap, you can rely on there being at most one file which can be downloaded using that cap. For mutable files it is even safer. If an attacker could find an input which yielded the same output as someone *else*'s input (that is, to find a "second pre-image"), then that attacker could write changes to a mutable file or directory that they were not authorized to write to. Finding a second pre-image is probably much harder than finding a collision -- for example nobody has yet figured out how to find a second pre-image in SHA-1. That's why I say it is even safer. You already assume that the person who can write to a mutable file can make it so that two or more different file contents would be downloaded from using the same mutable-file read cap, but for immutable files we hold them to a higher standard and prevent even the original uploader of the immutable file from being able to make more than one file that matches the immutable-file read cap. There are a lot more details of how Tahoe uses hash functions that I would be happy to work out when I have time, but those are the most important ones, and the immutable file caps are the most likely to turn out to be vulnerable. (Although, as I've said, even the immutable file caps are extremely unlikely to be vulnerable.) (Hm, this puts an interesting twist on Vincent and Nathan's idea of layering Mercurial-or-Bazaar on top of Tahoe. Tahoe uses stronger cryptography (and also more flexible cryptography, by the way), so if you have uploaded your Mercurial repository to Tahoe then even when SHA-1 turns out to be weak (as it has), you can still rely on the integrity of your repository.)

ps: For the case of Merkel Trees, are any security guarantees preserved in the face of hash collision attacks?

Sure -- a Merkle Tree has collision-resistance if the underlying hash has collision-resistance, and a Merkle Tree has second-preimage- resistance if the underlying hash has second-preimage resistance. So if the underlying has doesn't have collision-resistance but does have second-preimage-resistance (as we currently suspect that SHA-1 might), then your Merkle Tree would stil have second-preimage- resistance. Also a Merkle Tree might be stronger than its underlying hash function in a few ways, even if the underlying hash is somewhat weak.

d. For an existing grid how feasible is an upgrade to a new hash format which preserves all data?

It is certainly possible to preserve all the data. The obvious way is to download your files and re-upload them in the new format. I suspect that will probably end up being the best way, too. I would like to emphasize that it is extremely unlikely that anyone will need to do this due to a weakness in the hashing algorithm in Tahoe in a hurry. The people who are suffering from the collisions in MD5 and SHA-1 are suffering, not because MD5 or SHA-1 were suddenly revealed to be insecure, but because they ignored the warning messages from cryptographers for many years. (I'm a tad irritated about this, since "I tried to tell them" [5] and "They wouldn't listen!" [6].) By the time that SHA-256 (plus our tagging and salting) is vulnerable to collisions, which could be anywhere from five years to a hundred years from now, we will have already upgraded Tahoe to use a stronger hash function (SHA-3 or a SHA-3 candidate) and gracefully upgraded pre-existing files. Now the actual details of securely upgrading extant files to new integrity check mechanisms could be interesting. We've thought a bit about how to facilitate future graceful upgrades and this will no doubt prompt us to think about it some more. The stickiest bits are in the capability itself. Let's put it this way: suppose you upload a file to a Tahoe grid today and get an immutable read cap in return. Then suppose a few years from now someone does some unspecified operation which adds stronger hashes to the file as it exists out there on the servers. Now, how do you as the holder of the original immutable read cap know that those new stronger hashes are correct? You don't, because your read-cap wasn't generated from those new stronger hashes. This isn't a weakness in the Tahoe capability-oriented design, it's more of a fundamental problem which is just thrown into sharper light by the cap design. You can, of course, choose to delegate your decision about whether or not the file is correct to someone else (using Tahoe as well as using any other scheme), but if you want to actually have certainty *yourself* that the file is correct using the new hashes, then you're going to have to do some sort of download and computation on the file yourself, using the new hash algorithm. Regards, Zooko [1] http://www.toad.com/gnu [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_hardware_attack [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bot_nets [5] http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0506/5273.html [6] http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0506/5299.html _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev@allmydata.org http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE