[Haskell-cafe] Tor project

[Tobias Dammers]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 12:03:34PM +0200, Wojciech Narczyński wrote:
> 
> W dniu 2014-08-01 11:56, Tobias Dammers pisze:
> >On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 09:35:37AM +0200, Wojtek Narczyński wrote:
> >>Why the gimmick, for each and every piece of crypto code? Why not just use
> >>the clock for timing? The crypto lib would probably have to tune itself on
> >>startup.
> >Sorry, I didn't mean use the crypto function to cause the delay; I meant
> >using a cryptographic hash to determine how long the delay should be.
> >Once we have a number, the system clock should of course be used to
> >actually delay things.
> >
> >
> This is poinlessly complicated.
> 
> Just measure how much each execution takes, remove outliers, take the upper
> bound, wait appropriate amount of time on each call so that the attacker
> sees constant time for each call.
> 

I think you are underestimating the statistical aspect to this. In order
to do this in a useful way, you'd have to sample your own code on a
regular basis, for a large number of inputs, and you better get the
padding exactly right, because if it's off by a tiny amount, that tiny
amount will remain after averaging. It will basically boil down to a
sampling war between you and the attacker - if your sampling is really
good, your error may be really small, but the attacker can counter this
by sampling more. To make matters worse, you are playing this game
blindly: you don't know how much sampling is enough, or how much the
attacker can afford to sample.

I also think you are over-estimating the complexity of the crypto-hash
solution: suitable hashing functions are there for the taking (it
doesn't even have to be a time-hard function like bcrypt/scrypt/...
AFAIK, just one that's cryptographically sound), converting a hash into
a delay value is trivial, and you need to implement a delay mechanism
anyhow. The most "challenging" part, I think, is managing a secret to
seed the hash function.