[Ach] Proposal to Remove legacy TLS Ciphersuits Offered by Firefox

[Aaron Zauner]

Hi Julien,

I took the liberty to answer a few of your questions (in CC to dev-tech-crypto and ach). Others might want to add something as well:

On 02 Jan 2014, at 18:09, Julien Vehent <julien at linuxwall.info> wrote:

> Overall, I think this guide is great! The configuration examples are very useful.
> It's also good to have multiple TLS guides with different audiences, so I'm definitely
> glad to see more people take on the issue.

Thank you.

> Why prefer DHE to ECDHE, when the former is 3 times slower than the later?
> There is a bit of a justification in 3.5:
>    "Since there is much discussion on the security of ECC, flawed settings might very
>     well compromise the security of the entire system."
> I wish there was references to these "discussions". My understanding of the state of
> the art of ECC is that P-256 is considered at least as secure as DH and RSA.
Well, no. Bernstein and Lange have been auditing NIST/SECG and other standardized curves that are 
currently implemented in crypto libraries over the last years. They may be considered secure against
the ECDLP (some) but other issues remain that caused us to prefer DHe over ECDHe.
We’re aware of the performance implications - the paper in general tries to cope with best performance
and backwards compatability, but not at the cost of security. I’m aware that this philosophy might differ 
to that of the Mozilla Security Team. Recent publications have prompted some change in mindset though
and one cannot recommend a security guide that takes all factors into consideration at the potential cost
of (side channel) attacks or downgrade attacks.

Please take the time to read up on:
- http://www.hyperelliptic.org/tanja/vortraege/20130531.pdf
- http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/
- http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/10263/should-we-trust-the-nist-recommended-ecc-parameters 
(There’s also interesting research to Koblitz curves in the reply by thomas pornin)

> 
> They recommend AES-128 in "3.4. Keylengths", but publish a ciphersuite that prefers
> AES-256 (see below). This is probably just an oversight, the guide is still in "Draft”.
Our viewpoint was that if possible, take a stronger cipher. We’re aware that people might want 
to change this in their configuration if performance is paramount. We probably should discuss this again.

> The guide is not backward compatible with all clients. We, at Mozilla, must maintain
> backward compatibility with even the oldest, most broken, clients on the internet, and
> this shapes our guidelines. For example, the ciphersuite B doesn't contain 3DES or RC4,
> and is therefore unusable on *a lot* of PC that still run Windows XP. I wish we could
> just remove these two ciphers, but it's not a realistic goal in the near future.
I personally think this is the wrong descision. I’m aware that you want to cater to as many clients as possible,
but you also want to ship a solid and secure product. What people see and care about when they surf from 
XP machines using RC4 or 3DES is this nice green padlock in the browser bar. What they actually get as 
security are ciphers that have been considered insecure in academia for now over 15 years.

> Same goes for the recommendation to use DH parameters > 1024 bits. We tried using a 2048
> bits parameter a few months back. We first noticed a big spike in CPU usage, caused by
> the largest exponentiation, but that was still acceptable. What forced the rollback is
> the long list of java 6 clients that broke, because they don't accept DH keys > 1024 bits.
> Until all of these clients get fixed, DH params will be limited to 1024 bits.
As far as I know stronger DH params are supported by the Java Crypto Extensions package. That said
it’s usually not deployed anywhere. We’re aware of the issue but using DH parameters of 1024 bits only
can provide security that is slightly less than 1024bit RSA which can certainly be factored by large agencies.
- It takes you about 48hours to factor 512bit RSA keys in EC2:  http://crypto.2013.rump.cr.yp.to/981774ce07e51813fd4466612a78601b.pdf
- The largest Key factored by public research (in a small university setup!) is currently at 768 bits: http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006

We hope that Java will adopt a reasonable security policy in the future, although I’m personally not conviced that they will.

> I *think* they want to prefer CAMELLIA to AES, judging by the published ciphersuite.
> But the construction must be wrong because it returns AES first. If the intent is to
> prefer Camellia, then I am most interesting in the rationale.
Thanks for reporting this!

Yes. The intent was to prefer Camellia where possible. First off we wanted to have more diversity. Second not everybody
is running a sandybridge (or newer) processor. Camellia has better performance for non-intel processors with about the
same security. We hope the IETF TLS-WG will chose to adopt the proposal by Adam Langley of Google to include the 
ChaCha20 stream cipher and Poly1305 MAC to TLS. It’s already implemented in Chrome. It’ll provide for better security
with lower performance overhead and more diversity for users with non-Intel processors. 

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-chacha20poly1305-00

Is there a good reason not to prefer Camellia over AES? The issue is, if it’s not prefered it won’t get used in any type of
machine as it’s set up because all clients will end up using AES due to the way the ciphersuite is implemented.

> ECDSA is explicitely discarded. It doesn't hurt to have it enabled, and makes the
> ciphersuite portable to systems that prefer ECDSA certicates (granted, it's not that many…).
Agreed. And we will as soon as a TLS standard supports other Curves as well. Don’t get me wrong; ECC is a cool thing and very
good for security with relatively low performance overhead as compared to RSA - But it’s also quite new in terms of implementation
in libraries and security audits. With the research I refered to above I’d feel more safe to remove ECDSA for now.

Thanks,
Aaron

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