Internet Draft R. Zuccherato(Entrust Technologies) S/MIME Working Group March 1999 expires in six months Methods for Avoiding the "Small-Subgroup" Attacks on the Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement Method for S/MIME Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved. Abstract In some circumstances the use of the Diffie-Hellman key agreement scheme in a prime order subgroup of a large prime p is vulnerable to certain attacks known as "small-subgroup" attacks. Methods exist, however, to prevent these attacks. This document will describe the situations relevent to the S/MIME standard in which protection is required and the methods that can be used to to prevent these attacks. 1. Introduction This document will describe those situations in which protection from "small-subgroup" type attacks are required when using Diffie-Hellman key agreement as described in [x942] for S/MIME. Thus, the ephemeral-static modes of Diffie-Hellman will be focussed on. The situations that require protection are those in which an attacker could determine a substantial portion (i.e. more than a few bits) of a user's private key. Protecting oneself from these attacks involves certain costs. These costs may include additional processing time either when a public key is certified or a shared secret key is derived, increased parameter generation time, increased key size, and possibly the licensing of encumbered technologies. All of these factors must be considered when Zuccherato Page 1 deciding whether or not to protect oneself from these attacks, or whether to engineer the application so that protection is not required. We will not consider "attacks" where the other party in the key agreement merely forces the shared secret value to be "weak" (i.e. from a small set of possible values). These types of attacks are not possible to prevent, since the other party may always make the encrypted text public anyway. 1.1 Notation In this document we will use the same notation as in [x942]. In particular the shared secret ZZ is generated as follows: ZZ = g ^ (xb * xa) mod p Note that the individual parties actually perform the computations: ZZ = yb ^ xa (mod p) = ya ^ xb mod p where ^ denotes exponentiation. ya is party a's public key; ya = g ^ xa mod p yb is party b's public key; yb = g ^ xb mod p xa is party a's private key xb is party b's private key p is a large prime g = h^((p-1)/q) mod p, where h is any integer with 1 < h < p-1 such that h^((p-1)/q) mod p > 1 (g has order q mod p) q is a large prime j a large integer such that p=q*j + 1 In this discussion, a "static" public key is one that is certified and is used for more than one key agreement and an "ephemeral" public key is one that is not certified but is used only one time. The order of an integer y modulo p is the smallest value of x greater than 1 such that y^x=1 mod p. 1.2 Brief Description of Attack For a complete description of these attacks see [LAW] and [LIM]. If the other party in an execution of the Diffie-Hellman key agreement method has a public key not of the form described above, but of small order (where small means =q). This will prevent an attacker from being able to find an element of small order modulo p and thus mount this attack. To produce primes of this form, the prime generation algorithm could be run multiple times until a prime with this form is obtained. As an example, the value of r could be tested for primality. If it is prime the value of p could be accepted, otherwise the prime generation algorithm would be run again, until a value of p is produced with r prime. However, since with primes of this form there is still an element of order 2 (i.e. -1), one bit of the private key could still be lost. Thus, this method may not be appropriate in circumstances where even the loss of one bit of the private key is a concern. Another option is to choose the prime p such that p = 2*q*r + 1 where r is small (i.e. only a few bits). In this case, the leakage due to a small subgroup attack will be only a few bits. Again, this would not be appropriate for circumstances where the loss of even a few bits of the private key is a concern. Zuccherato Page 4 3.4 Compatible Cofactor Exponentiation This method of protection is specified in [p1363] and [KALISKI]. It involves modifying the computation of ZZ. Instead of computing ZZ as ZZ=yb^xa mod p, party a would compute it as ZZ=(yb^j)^c mod p where c=j^(-1)*xa mod q. (Similarly for party b.) If the resulting value ZZ satisfies ZZ==1, then the key agreement should be abandoned because the public key being used is invalid. Note that this procedure may be subject to pending patents. 4. Ephemeral-Ephemeral Key Agreement This situation is when both the sender and recipient of a message are using ephemeral keys. While this situation is not specifically allowed in S/MIME, some users may however attempt to use this mode and thus we will describe protection for this case as well. In most ephemeral-ephemeral key agreements protection is required for both entities. In this situation an attacker could modify the other entity's public key in order to determine the user's private key (as described in Section 1.2). Another possibility is that the attacker could modify both parties' public key so as to make their shared key predictable. For example, the attacker could replace both ya and yb with some element of small order, say -1. Then, with a certain probability, both the sender and receiver would compute the same shared value which comes from some small, easily exhaustible set. Note that in this situation if protection was obtained from the methods of Section 3.3, then each user must ensure that the other party's public key does not come from the small set of elements of small order. This can be done either by checking a list of such elements, or by additionally applying the methods of Section 3.1. Protection from these attacks is not required however if the other party's ephemeral public key has been signed by the other party. For example in the Station-To-Station protocol [STS] no protection is required because a third party would not be able to alter the other party's public key and thus the only person that could attack the private key is the other party, who will be able to decrypt the message anyway. Since the private key is ephemeral, no other messages would be compromised even if the entire private key was compromised. 5. Security Considerations This entire document concerns security considerations. 6. Intellectual Property Rights The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to per- tain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made Zuccherato Page 5 any effort to identify any such rights. Information on the IETF's procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and standards- related documentation can be found in BCP-11. Copies of claims of rights made available for publication and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementors or users of this specification can be obtained from the IETF Secretariat. The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice this standard. Please address the information to the IETF Executive Director. 7. References [STS] W. Diffie, P.C. van Oorschot and M. Wiener, "Authentication and authenticated key exchanges", Designs, Codes and Cryptography, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 107-125. [KALISKI] B.S. Kaliski, Jr., "Compatible cofactor multiplication for Diffie-Hellman primitives", Electronics Letters, vol. 34, no. 25, December 10, 1998, pp. 2396-2397. [LAW98] L. Law, A. Menezes, M. Qu, J. Solinas and S. Vanstone, "An efficient protocol for authenticated key agreement", Technical report CORR 98-05, University of Waterloo, 1998. [LIM] C.H. Lim and P.J. Lee, "A key recovery attack on discrete log- based schemes using a prime order subgroup", B.S. Kaliski, Jr., editor, Advances in Cryptology - Crypto '97, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1295, 1997, Springer-Verlag, pp. 249-263. [P1363] IEEE P1363, Standard Specifications for Public Key Cryptography, 1998, work in progress. [x942] E. Rescorla, "Diffie-Hellman Key Agreement Method", draft-ietf- smime-x942-0X.txt, work in progress. 8. Authors' Addresses Robert Zuccherato Entrust Technologies 750 Heron Road Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1V 1A7 robert.zuccherato@entrust.com Zuccherato Page 6 Appendix A. Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (date). All Rights Reserved. This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. In addition, the ASN.1 modules presented in Appendices A and B may be used in whole or in part without inclusion of the copyright notice. However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of develop- ing Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process shall be followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than English. The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns. This document and the information contained herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Zuccherato Page 7