[zfs] [Review] 4185 New hash algorithm support

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sat Oct 19 04:35:21 PDT 2013


----- Forwarded message from Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org> -----

Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 13:26:08 +0200
From: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org>
To: zfs at lists.illumos.org
Subject: Re: [zfs] [Review] 4185 New hash algorithm support
Message-ID: <20131019112608.GF1408 at garage.freebsd.pl>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)
Reply-To: zfs at lists.illumos.org

On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 11:18:21PM +0100, Saso Kiselkov wrote:
> On 10/7/13 10:17 PM, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn wrote:
> > So, before I go on with my pitch for why you should consider BLAKE2,
> > first please clarify for me whether ZFS really needs a
> > collision-resistant hash function, or whether it needs only a MAC. I
> > had thought until now that ZFS doesn't need a collision-resistant hash
> > unless dedup is turned on, and that if dedup is turned on it needs a
> > collision-resistant hash.
> 
> The reason is purely for dedup and pretty much nothing else. As such, we
> only need a hash with a good pseudo-random output distribution and
> collision resistance. We don't specifically need it to be super-secure.
> The salted hashing support I added was simply to silence the endless
> stream of wild hypotheticals on security.

Just FYI, Richard Yao just proposed providing VM images with existing
ZFS pool also for production use. This is great idea, but also a nice
proof why making assumptions on how exactly a general purpose software
will be used is bad. In this case your salted hashing is pointless as
everyone knows about the salt in those images. And we are back to square
one.

Saso, there are countless examples where so called hypothetical security
bugs turned out to be exploitable in practise. Which is especially true
for general purpose software that we have no control over how it is
being used.

As Zooko mentioned cryptoanalysis of the Edon-R algorithm stopped at the
point where we know it is not cryptographically secure and this is
unlikely we will see any further work in the subject, which in my eyes
is even worse, as we don't know how bad is it.

To sum up. Even if the OpenZFS community will agree to integrate Edon-R,
I'll strongly oppose having it in FreeBSD. In my opinion it is just
asking for trouble. I still like your change very much and would love to
see new, cryptographically secure hash algorithms for dedup in ZFS.
Currently there is no alternative, which is bad for security too.

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheelsystems.com
FreeBSD committer                         http://www.FreeBSD.org
Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!                     http://mobter.com



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