Thursday, May 21, 2015

weakdh trickery

Now, that the TURMOIL slides make sense, I adjusted my own
projects. The good news is that I always used to generate
unique DH params (I wonder so many ppl apparently didnt -
there is no real benefit to use hard coded values, except to Eve!?)
in my projects during or before build. So it should be
quite hard for a Nation State Adversary to break that.

For lophttpd and crashd, I removed 512 and 1024 bit DH params
support and use 2048bit instead. opmsg always supported
2048bit (and higher), but the default was 1024. So I changed
the default to 2048 bit. Existing personas can be "upgraded" by
using the --newdhp switch. I was thinking this switch
may just be used in rare cases, but now it turns out it
was the right decision to design opmsg protocol with easy
DH params re-creation in mind. SUCCESS! DH keys that are
already "in flight" cant be upgraded, but may be used
as before (taking the 'weaker' 1024bit into account) even
after upgrading to 2048bit DH params.

Unfortunally, 2048bit keys come at the cost of a longer key
generation process. This may take a couple of minutes.
If thats too much for you, you are free to change your default
DH params len to 1892 or whatever your level of secrecy
demands.

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