| Network Working Group | A. Bittau |
| Internet-Draft | |
| Intended status: Experimental | D. Giffin |
| Expires: April 7, 2018 | Stanford University |
| M. Handley | |
| University College London | |
| D. Mazieres | |
| Stanford University | |
| Q. Slack | |
| Sourcegraph | |
| E. Smith | |
| Kestrel Institute | |
| October 4, 2017 |
Cryptographic protection of TCP Streams (tcpcrypt)
draft-ietf-tcpinc-tcpcrypt-07
This document specifies tcpcrypt, a TCP encryption protocol designed for use in conjunction with the TCP Encryption Negotiation Option (TCP-ENO). Tcpcrypt coexists with middleboxes by tolerating resegmentation, NATs, and other manipulations of the TCP header. The protocol is self-contained and specifically tailored to TCP implementations, which often reside in kernels or other environments in which large external software dependencies can be undesirable. Because the size of TCP options is limited, the protocol requires one additional one-way message latency to perform key exchange before application data may be transmitted. However, this cost can be avoided between two hosts that have recently established a previous tcpcrypt connection.
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
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."
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 7, 2018.
Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
This document describes tcpcrypt, an extension to TCP for cryptographic protection of session data. Tcpcrypt was designed to meet the following goals:
This section describes the tcpcrypt protocol at an abstract level. The concrete format of all messages is specified in Section 4.
Setting up a tcpcrypt connection employs three types of cryptographic algorithms:
The Extract and CPRF functions used by default are the Extract and Expand functions of HKDF [RFC5869]. These are defined as follows in terms of the function HMAC-Hash(key, value) for a negotiated Hash function; the symbol | denotes concatenation, and the counter concatenated to the right of CONST occupies a single octet.
HKDF-Extract(salt, IKM) -> PRK PRK = HMAC-Hash(salt, IKM) HKDF-Expand(PRK, CONST, L) -> OKM T(0) = empty string (zero length) T(1) = HMAC-Hash(PRK, T(0) | CONST | 0x01) T(2) = HMAC-Hash(PRK, T(1) | CONST | 0x02) T(3) = HMAC-Hash(PRK, T(2) | CONST | 0x03) ... OKM = first L octets of T(1) | T(2) | T(3) | ...
Figure 1: HKDF functions used for key derivation
Lastly, once tcpcrypt has been successfully set up and encryption keys have been derived, an algorithm for Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) is used to protect the confidentiality and integrity of all transmitted application data. AEAD algorithms use a single key to encrypt their input data and also to generate a cryptographic tag to accompany the resulting ciphertext; when decryption is performed, the tag allows authentication of the encrypted data and of optional, associated plaintext data.
Tcpcrypt depends on TCP-ENO [I-D.ietf-tcpinc-tcpeno] to negotiate whether encryption will be enabled for a connection, and also which key agreement scheme to use. TCP-ENO negotiates the use of a particular TCP encryption protocol or TEP by including protocol identifiers in ENO suboptions. This document associates four TEP identifiers with the tcpcrypt protocol, as listed in Table 2. Each identifier indicates the use of a particular key-agreement scheme. Future standards may associate additional identifiers with tcpcrypt.
An active opener that wishes to negotiate the use of tcpcrypt includes an ENO option in its SYN segment. That option includes suboptions with tcpcrypt TEP identifiers indicating the key-agreement schemes it is willing to enable. The active opener MAY additionally include suboptions indicating support for encryption protocols other than tcpcrypt, as well as global suboptions as specified by TCP-ENO.
If a passive opener receives an ENO option including tcpcrypt TEPs it supports, it MAY then attach an ENO option to its SYN-ACK segment, including solely the TEP it wishes to enable.
To establish distinct roles for the two hosts in each connection, tcpcrypt depends on the role-negotiation mechanism of TCP-ENO. As one result of the negotiation process, TCP-ENO assigns hosts unique roles abstractly called "A" at one end of the connection and "B" at the other. Generally, an active opener plays the "A" role and a passive opener plays the "B" role; but in the case of simultaneous open, an additional mechanism breaks the symmetry and assigns different roles to the two hosts. This document adopts the terms "host A" and "host B" to identify each end of a connection uniquely, following TCP-ENO's designation.
ENO suboptions include a flag v which indicates the presence of associated, variable-length data. In order to propose fresh key agreement with a particular tcpcrypt TEP, a host sends a one-byte suboption containing the TEP identifier and v = 0. In order to propose session resumption (described further below) with a particular TEP, a host sends a variable-length suboption containing the TEP identifier, the flag v = 1, and an identifier for a session previously negotiated with the same host and the same TEP.
Once two hosts have exchanged SYN segments, TCP-ENO defines the negotiated TEP to be the last valid TEP identifier in the SYN segment of host B (that is, the passive opener in the absence of simultaneous open) that also occurs in that of host A. If there is no such TEP, hosts MUST disable TCP-ENO and tcpcrypt.
If the negotiated TEP was sent by host B with v = 0, it means that fresh key agreement will be performed as described below in Section 3.3. If it had v = 1, the key-exchange messages will be omitted in favor of determining keys via session-resumption as described in Section 3.5, and protected application data may immediately be sent as detailed in Section 3.6.
Note that the negotiated TEP is determined without reference to the v bits in ENO suboptions, so if host A offers resumption with a particular TEP and host B replies with a non-resumption suboption with the same TEP, that may become the negotiated TEP and fresh key agreement will be performed. That is, sending a resumption suboption also implies willingness to perform fresh key agreement with the indicated TEP.
As required by TCP-ENO, once a host has both sent and received an ACK segment containing a valid ENO option, encryption MUST be enabled and plaintext application data MUST NOT ever be exchanged on the connection. If the negotiated TEP is among those listed in Table 2, a host MUST follow the protocol described in this document.
Following successful negotiation of a tcpcrypt TEP, all further signaling is performed in the Data portion of TCP segments. Except when resumption was negotiated (described below in Section 3.5), the two hosts perform key exchange through two messages, Init1 and Init2, at the start of the data streams of host A and host B, respectively. These messages may span multiple TCP segments and need not end at a segment boundary. However, the segment containing the last byte of an Init1 or Init2 message MUST have TCP's push flag (PSH) set.
The key exchange protocol, in abstract, proceeds as follows:
A -> B: Init1 = { INIT1_MAGIC, sym-cipher-list, N_A, PK_A }
B -> A: Init2 = { INIT2_MAGIC, sym-cipher, N_B, PK_B }
The concrete format of these messages is specified in Section 4.1.
The parameters are defined as follows:
The ephemeral secret (ES) is the result of the key-agreement algorithm (see Section 5) indicated by the negotiated TEP. The inputs to the algorithm are the local host's ephemeral private key and the remote host's ephemeral public key. For example, host A would compute ES using its own private key (not transmitted) and host B's public key, PK_B.
The two sides then compute a pseudo-random key (PRK), from which all session keys are derived, as follows:
PRK = Extract(N_A, eno-transcript | Init1 | Init2 | ES)
Above, | denotes concatenation; eno-transcript is the protocol-negotiation transcript defined in Section 4.8 of [I-D.ietf-tcpinc-tcpeno]; and Init1 and Init2 are the transmitted encodings of the messages described in Section 4.1.
A series of "session secrets" are then computed from PRK as follows:
ss[0] = PRK ss[i] = CPRF(ss[i-1], CONST_NEXTK, K_LEN)
The value ss[0] is used to generate all key material for the current connection. The values ss[i] for i > 0 can be used to avoid public key cryptography when establishing subsequent connections between the same two hosts, as described in Section 3.5. The CONST_* values are constants defined in Table 1. The length K_LEN depends on the tcpcrypt TEP in use, and is specified in Section 5.
Given a session secret ss, the two sides compute a series of master keys as follows:
mk[0] = CPRF(ss, CONST_REKEY, K_LEN) mk[i] = CPRF(mk[i-1], CONST_REKEY, K_LEN)
The particular master key in use is advanced as described in Section 3.8.
Finally, each master key mk is used to generate keys for authenticated encryption for the "A" and "B" roles. Key k_ab is used by host A to encrypt and host B to decrypt, while k_ba is used by host B to encrypt and host A to decrypt.
k_ab = CPRF(mk, CONST_KEY_A, ae_keylen) k_ba = CPRF(mk, CONST_KEY_B, ae_keylen)
The value ae_keylen depends on the authenticated-encryption algorithm selected, and is given under "Key Length" in Table 3.
After host B sends Init2 or host A receives it, that host may immediately begin transmitting protected application data as described in Section 3.6.
If host A receives Init2 with a sym-cipher value that was not present in the sym-cipher-list it previously transmitted in Init1, it MUST abort the connection and raise an error condition distinct from the end-of-file condition.
Throughout this document, to "abort the connection" means to issue the "Abort" command as described in [RFC0793], Section 3.8. That is, the TCP connection is destroyed, RESET is transmitted, and the local user is alerted to the abort event.
TCP-ENO requires each TEP to define a session ID value that uniquely identifies each encrypted connection.
As required, a tcpcrypt session ID begins with the negotiated TEP identifier along with the v bit as transmitted by host B. The remainder of the ID is derived from the session secret, as follows:
session_id[i] = TEP-byte | CPRF(ss[i], CONST_SESSID, K_LEN)
Again, the length K_LEN depends on the TEP, and is specified in Section 5.
When two hosts have already negotiated session secret ss[i-1], they can establish a new connection without public-key operations using ss[i]. A host signals willingness to resume with a particular session secret by sending a SYN segment with a resumption suboption: that is, an ENO suboption containing the negotiated TEP identifier from the original session and part of an identifier for the session.
The resumption identifier is calculated from a session secret ss[i] as follows:
resume[i] = CPRF(ss[i], CONST_RESUME, 18)
To name a session for resumption, a host sends either the first or second half of the resumption identifier, according to the role it played in the original session with secret ss[0].
A host that originally played role A and wishes to resume from a cached session sends a suboption with the first half of the resumption identifier:
byte 0 1 9 (10 bytes total)
+--------+--------+---...---+--------+
| TEP- | resume[i]{0..8} |
| byte | |
+--------+--------+---...---+--------+
Figure 2: Resumption suboption sent when original role was A. The TEP-byte contains a tcpcrypt TEP identifier and v = 1.
Similarly, a host that originally played role B sends a suboption with the second half of the resumption identifier:
byte 0 1 9 (10 bytes total)
+--------+--------+---...---+--------+
| TEP- | resume[i]{9..17} |
| byte | |
+--------+--------+---...---+--------+
Figure 3: Resumption suboption sent when original role was B. The TEP-byte contains a tcpcrypt TEP identifier and v = 1.
If a passive opener recognizes the identifier-half in a resumption suboption it has received and knows ss[i], it SHOULD (with exceptions specified below) agree to resume from the cached session by sending its own resumption suboption, which will contain the other half of the identifier.
If it does not agree to resumption with a particular TEP, the passive opener may either request fresh key exchange by responding with a non-resumption suboption using the same TEP, or else respond to any other received suboption.
If an active opener receives a resumption suboption for a particular TEP and the received identifier-half does not match the resume[i] value whose other half it previously sent in a resumption suboption for the same TEP, it MUST ignore that suboption. In the typical case that this was the only ENO suboption received, this means the host MUST disable TCP-ENO and tcpcrypt: that is, it MUST NOT send any more ENO options and MUST NOT encrypt the connection.
When a host concludes that TCP-ENO negotiation has succeeded for some TEP that was received in a resumption suboption, it MUST then enable encryption with that TEP, using the cached session secret, as described in Section 3.6.
The session ID (Section 3.4) is constructed in the same way for resumed sessions as it is for fresh ones. In this case the first byte will always have v = 1. The remainder of the ID is derived from the cached session secret.
In the case of simultaneous open where TCP-ENO is able to establish asymmetric roles, two hosts that simultaneously send SYN segments with compatible resumption suboptions may resume the associated session.
In a particular SYN segment, a host SHOULD NOT send more than one resumption suboption, and MUST NOT send more than one resumption suboption with the same TEP identifier. But in addition to any resumption suboptions, an active opener MAY include non-resumption suboptions describing other key-agreement schemes it supports (in addition to that indicated by the TEP in the resumption suboption).
After using ss[i] to compute mk[0], implementations SHOULD compute and cache ss[i+1] for possible use by a later session, then erase ss[i] from memory. Hosts SHOULD retain ss[i+1] until it is used or the memory needs to be reclaimed. Hosts SHOULD NOT write a cached ss[i+1] value to non-volatile storage.
When proposing resumption, the active opener MUST use the lowest value of i that has not already been used (successfully or not) to negotiate resumption with the same host and for the same pre-session key ss[0].
A session secret may not be used to secure more than one TCP connection. To prevent this, a host MUST NOT resume with a session secret if it has ever enabled encryption in the past with the same secret, in either role. In the event that two hosts simultaneously send SYN segments to each other that propose resumption with the same session secret but the two segments are not part of a simultaneous open, both connections will have to revert to fresh key-exchange. To avoid this limitation, implementations MAY choose to implement session resumption such that a given pre-session key ss[0] is only used for either passive or active opens at the same host, not both.
When two hosts have previously negotiated a tcpcrypt session, either host may initiate session resumption regardless of which host was the active opener or played the "A" role in the previous session.
However, a given host must either encrypt with k_ab for all sessions derived from the same pre-session key ss[0], or with k_ba. Thus, which keys a host uses to send segments is not affected by the role it plays in the current connection: it depends only on whether the host played the "A" or "B" role in the initial session.
Implementations that perform session caching MUST provide a means for applications to control session caching, including flushing cached session secrets associated with an ESTABLISHED connection or disabling the use of caching for a particular connection.
Following key exchange (or its omission via session resumption), all further communication in a tcpcrypt-enabled connection is carried out within delimited encryption frames that are encrypted and authenticated using the agreed keys.
This protection is provided via algorithms for Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD). The particular algorithms that may be used are listed in Table 3. One algorithm is selected during the negotiation described in Section 3.3.
The format of an encryption frame is specified in Section 4.2. A sending host breaks its stream of application data into a series of chunks. Each chunk is placed in the data portion of a "plaintext" value, which is then encrypted to yield a frame's ciphertext field. Chunks must be small enough that the ciphertext (whose length depends on the AEAD cipher used, and is generally slightly longer than the plaintext) has length less than 2^16 bytes.
An "associated data" value (see Section 4.2.2) is constructed for the frame. It contains the frame's control field and the length of the ciphertext.
A "frame nonce" value (see Section 4.2.3) is also constructed for the frame but not explicitly transmitted. It contains an offset field whose integer value is the zero-indexed byte offset of the beginning of the current encryption frame in the underlying TCP datastream. (That is, the offset in the framing stream, not the plaintext application stream.) Because it is strictly necessary for the security of the AEAD algorithm, an implementation MUST NOT ever transmit distinct frames with the same nonce value under the same encryption key. In particular, a retransmitted TCP segment MUST contain the same payload bytes for the same TCP sequence numbers, and a host MUST NOT transmit more than 2^64 bytes in the underlying TCP datastream (which would cause the offset field to wrap) before re-keying.
With reference to the "AEAD Interface" described in Section 2 of [RFC5116], tcpcrypt invokes the AEAD algorithm with the secret key K set to k_ab or k_ba, according to the host's role as described in Section 3.3. The plaintext value serves as P, the associated data as A, and the frame nonce as N. The output of the encryption operation, C, is transmitted in the frame's ciphertext field.
When a frame is received, tcpcrypt reconstructs the associated data and frame nonce values (the former contains only data sent in the clear, and the latter is implicit in the TCP stream), and provides these and the ciphertext value to the the AEAD decryption operation. The output of this operation is either a plaintext value P or the special symbol FAIL. In the latter case, the implementation MUST either drop the TCP segment(s) containing the frame or abort the connection; but if it aborts, the implementation MUST raise an error condition distinct from the end-of-file condition.
The ciphertext field of the encryption frame contains protected versions of certain TCP header values.
When the URGp bit is set, the urgent value indicates an offset from the current frame's beginning offset; the sum of these offsets gives the index of the last byte of urgent data in the application datastream.
A sender MUST set the FINp bit on the last frame it sends in the connection (unless it aborts the connection), and MUST NOT set FINp on any other frame.
TCP sets the FIN flag when a sender has no more data, which with tcpcrypt means setting FIN on the segment containing the last byte of the last frame. However, a receiver MUST report the end-of-file condition to the connection's local user when and only when it receives a frame with the FINp bit set. If a host receives a segment with the TCP FIN flag set but the received datastream including this segment does not contain a frame with FINp set, the host SHOULD abort the connection and raise an error condition distinct from the end-of-file condition; but if there are unacknowledged segments whose retransmission could potentially result in a valid frame, the host MAY instead drop the segment with the TCP FIN flag set.
Re-keying allows hosts to wipe from memory keys that could decrypt previously transmitted segments. It also allows the use of AEAD ciphers that can securely encrypt only a bounded number of messages under a given key.
We refer to the two encryption keys (k_ab, k_ba) as a key-set. We refer to the key-set generated by mk[i] as the key-set with generation number i within a session. Each host maintains a local generation number that determines which key-set it uses to encrypt outgoing frames, and a remote generation number equal to the highest generation used in frames received from its peer. Initially, these two values are set to zero.
A host MAY increment its local generation number beyond the remote generation number it has recorded. We call this action initiating re-keying.
When a host has incremented its local generation number and uses the new key-set for the first time to encrypt an outgoing frame, it MUST set rekey = 1 for that frame. It MUST set this field to zero in all other cases.
When a host receives a frame with rekey = 1, it increments its record of the remote generation number. If the remote generation number is now greater than the local generation number, the receiver MUST immediately increment its local generation number to match. Moreover, if the receiver has not yet transmitted a segment with the FIN flag set, it MUST immediately send a frame (with empty application data if necessary) with rekey = 1.
A host SHOULD NOT initiate more than one concurrent re-key operation if it has no data to send; that is, it should not initiate re-keying with an empty encryption frame more than once while its record of the remote generation number is less than its own.
When retransmitting, implementations must always transmit the same bytes for the same TCP sequence numbers. Thus, a frame in a retransmitted segment MUST always be encrypted with the same key as when it was originally transmitted.
Implementations SHOULD delete older-generation keys from memory once they have received all frames they will need to decrypt with the old keys and have encrypted all outgoing frames under the old keys.
Instead of using TCP Keep-Alives to verify that the remote endpoint is still responsive, tcpcrypt implementations SHOULD employ the re-keying mechanism for this purpose, as follows. When necessary, a host SHOULD probe the liveness of its peer by initiating re-keying and transmitting a new frame immediately (with empty application data if necessary).
As described in Section 3.8, a host receiving a frame encrypted under a generation number greater than its own MUST increment its own generation number and (if it has not already transmitted a segment with FIN set) immediately transmit a new frame (with zero-length application data if necessary).
Implementations MAY use TCP Keep-Alives for purposes that do not require endpoint authentication, as discussed in Section 8.2.
This section provides byte-level encodings for values transmitted or computed by the protocol.
The Init1 message has the following encoding:
byte 0 1 2 3
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| INIT1_MAGIC |
| |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
4 5 6 7
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| message_len |
| = M |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
8
+--------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
|nciphers|sym- |sym- | |sym- |
| =K+1 |cipher0|cipher1| |cipherK|
+--------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
K + 10 K + 10 + N_A_LEN
| |
v v
+-------+---...---+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
| N_A | PK_A |
| | |
+-------+---...---+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
M - 1
+-------+---...---+-------+
| ignored |
| |
+-------+---...---+-------+
The constant INIT1_MAGIC is defined in Table 1. The four-byte field message_len gives the length of the entire Init1 message, encoded as a big-endian integer. The nciphers field contains an integer value that specifies the number of one-byte symmetric-cipher identifiers that follow. The sym-cipher bytes identify cryptographic algorithms in Table 3. The length N_A_LEN and the length of PK_A are both determined by the negotiated key-agreement scheme, as described in Section 5.
When sending Init1, implementations of this protocol MUST omit the field ignored; that is, they must construct the message such that its end, as determined by message_len, coincides with the end of the field PK_A. When receiving Init1, however, implementations MUST permit and ignore any bytes following PK_A.
The Init2 message has the following encoding:
byte 0 1 2 3
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| INIT2_MAGIC |
| |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+
4 5 6 7 8
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| message_len |sym- |
| = M |cipher |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
9 9 + N_B_LEN
| |
v v
+-------+---...---+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
| N_B | PK_B |
| | |
+-------+---...---+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
M - 1
+-------+---...---+-------+
| ignored |
| |
+-------+---...---+-------+
The constant INIT2_MAGIC is defined in Table 1. The four-byte field message_len gives the length of the entire Init2 message, encoded as a big-endian integer. The sym-cipher value is a selection from the symmetric-cipher identifiers in the previously-received Init1 message. The length N_B_LEN and the length of PK_B are both determined by the negotiated key-agreement scheme, as described in Section 5.
When sending Init2, implementations of this protocol MUST omit the field ignored; that is, they must construct the message such that its end, as determined by message_len, coincides with the end of the PK_B field. When receiving Init2, however, implementations MUST permit and ignore any bytes following PK_B.
An encryption frame comprises a control byte and a length-prefixed ciphertext value:
byte 0 1 2 3 clen+2 +-------+-------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+ |control| clen | ciphertext | +-------+-------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
The field clen is an integer in big-endian format and gives the length of the ciphertext field.
The byte control has this structure:
bit 7 1 0
+-------+---...---+-------+-------+
| cres | rekey |
+-------+---...---+-------+-------+
The seven-bit field cres is reserved; implementations MUST set these bits to zero when sending, and MUST ignore them when receiving.
The use of the rekey field is described in Section 3.8.
The ciphertext field is the result of applying the negotiated authenticated-encryption algorithm to a "plaintext" value, which has one of these two formats:
byte 0 1 plen-1 +-------+-------+---...---+-------+ | flags | data | +-------+-------+---...---+-------+ byte 0 1 2 3 plen-1 +-------+-------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+ | flags | urgent | data | +-------+-------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
(Note that clen in the previous section will generally be greater than plen, as the ciphertext produced by the authenticated-encryption scheme must both encrypt the application data and provide a way to verify its integrity.)
The flags byte has this structure:
bit 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
| fres |URGp|FINp|
+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
The six-bit value fres is reserved; implementations MUST set these six bits to zero when sending, and MUST ignore them when receiving.
When the URGp bit is set, it indicates that the urgent field is present, and thus that the plaintext value has the second structure variant above; otherwise the first variant is used.
The meaning of urgent and of the flag bits is described in Section 3.7.
An encryption frame's "associated data" (which is supplied to the AEAD algorithm when decrypting the ciphertext and verifying the frame's integrity) has this format:
byte 0 1 2 +-------+-------+-------+ |control| clen | +-------+-------+-------+
It contains the same values as the frame's control and clen fields.
Lastly, a "frame nonce" (provided as input to the AEAD algorithm) has this format:
byte +------+------+------+------+ 0 | FRAME_NONCE_MAGIC | +------+------+------+------+ 4 | | + offset + 8 | | +------+------+------+------+
The 4-byte magic constant is defined in Table 1. The 8-byte offset field contains an integer in big-endian format. Its value is specified in Section 3.6.
The table below defines values for the constants used in the protocol.
| Value | Name |
|---|---|
| 0x01 | CONST_NEXTK |
| 0x02 | CONST_SESSID |
| 0x03 | CONST_REKEY |
| 0x04 | CONST_KEY_A |
| 0x05 | CONST_KEY_B |
| 0x06 | CONST_RESUME |
| 0x15101a0e | INIT1_MAGIC |
| 0x097105e0 | INIT2_MAGIC |
| 0x44415441 | FRAME_NONCE_MAGIC |
The TEP negotiated via TCP-ENO may indicate the use of one of the key-agreement schemes named in Table 2. For example, TCPCRYPT_ECDHE_P256 names the tcpcrypt protocol with key-agreement scheme ECDHE-P256.
All schemes listed there use HKDF-Expand-SHA256 as the CPRF, and these lengths for nonces and session keys:
N_A_LEN: 32 bytes N_B_LEN: 32 bytes K_LEN: 32 bytes
Key-agreement schemes ECDHE-P256 and ECDHE-P521 employ the ECSVDP-DH secret value derivation primitive defined in [ieee1363]. The named curves are defined in [nist-dss]. When the public-key values PK_A and PK_B are transmitted as described in Section 4.1, they are encoded with the "Elliptic Curve Point to Octet String Conversion Primitive" described in Section E.2.3 of [ieee1363], and are prefixed by a two-byte length in big-endian format:
byte 0 1 2 L - 1 +-------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+ | pubkey_len | pubkey | | = L | | +-------+-------+-------+---...---+-------+
Implementations SHOULD encode these pubkey values in "compressed format", and MUST accept values encoded in "compressed", "uncompressed" or "hybrid" formats.
Key-agreement schemes ECDHE-Curve25519 and ECDHE-Curve448 use the functions X25519 and X448, respectively, to perform the Diffie-Helman protocol as described in [RFC7748]. When using these ciphers, public-key values PK_A and PK_B are transmitted directly with no length prefix: 32 bytes for Curve25519, and 56 bytes for Curve448.
A tcpcrypt implementation MUST support at least the schemes ECDHE-P256 and ECDHE-P521, although system administrators need not enable them.
Specifiers and key-lengths for AEAD algorithms are given in Table 3. The algorithms AEAD_AES_128_GCM and AEAD_AES_256_GCM are specified in [RFC5116]. The algorithm AEAD_CHACHA20_POLY1305 is specified in [RFC7539].
Tcpcrypt's TEP identifiers will need to be incorporated in IANA's "TCP encryption protocol identifiers" registry under the "Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Parameters" registry, as in the following table. The various key-agreement schemes used by these tcpcrypt variants are defined in Section 5.
| Value | Meaning | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| 0x21 | TCPCRYPT_ECDHE_P256 | [RFC-TBD] |
| 0x22 | TCPCRYPT_ECDHE_P521 | [RFC-TBD] |
| 0x23 | TCPCRYPT_ECDHE_Curve25519 | [RFC-TBD] |
| 0x24 | TCPCRYPT_ECDHE_Curve448 | [RFC-TBD] |
In Section 4.1, this document defines sym-cipher specifiers for which IANA is to maintain a new "tcpcrypt AEAD Algorithm" registry under the "Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Parameters" registry, with initial values as given in the following table. The AEAD algorithms named there are defined in Section 6. Future assignments are to be made under the "RFC Required" policy detailed in [RFC8126], relying on early allocation [RFC7120] to facilitate testing before an RFC is finalized.
| Value | AEAD Algorithm | Key Length | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0x01 | AEAD_AES_128_GCM | 16 bytes | [RFC-TBD] |
| 0x02 | AEAD_AES_256_GCM | 32 bytes | [RFC-TBD] |
| 0x10 | AEAD_CHACHA20_POLY1305 | 32 bytes | [RFC-TBD] |
Public-key generation, public-key encryption, and shared-secret generation all require randomness. Other tcpcrypt functions may also require randomness, depending on the algorithms and modes of operation selected. A weak pseudo-random generator at either host will compromise tcpcrypt's security. Many of tcpcrypt's cryptographic functions require random input, and thus any host implementing tcpcrypt MUST have access to a cryptographically-secure source of randomness or pseudo-randomness.
Most implementations will rely on system-wide pseudo-random generators seeded from hardware events and a seed carried over from the previous boot. Once a pseudo-random generator has been properly seeded, it can generate effectively arbitrary amounts of pseudo-random data. However, until a pseudo-random generator has been seeded with sufficient entropy, not only will tcpcrypt be insecure, it will reveal information that further weakens the security of the pseudo-random generator, potentially harming other applications. As required by TCP-ENO, implementations MUST NOT send ENO options unless they have access to an adequate source of randomness.
The cipher-suites specified in this document all use HMAC-SHA256 to implement the collision-resistant pseudo-random function denoted by CPRF. A collision-resistant function is one on which, for sufficiently large L, an attacker cannot find two distinct inputs K_1, CONST_1 and K_2, CONST_2 such that CPRF(K_1, CONST_1, L) = CPRF(K_2, CONST_2, L). Collision resistance is important to assure the uniqueness of session IDs, which are generated using the CPRF.
All of the security considerations of TCP-ENO apply to tcpcrypt. In particular, tcpcrypt does not protect against active eavesdroppers unless applications authenticate the session ID. If it can be established that the session IDs computed at each end of the connection match, then tcpcrypt guarantees that no man-in-the-middle attacks occurred unless the attacker has broken the underlying cryptographic primitives (e.g., ECDH). A proof of this property for an earlier version of the protocol has been published [tcpcrypt].
To gain middlebox compatibility, tcpcrypt does not protect TCP headers. Hence, the protocol is vulnerable to denial-of-service from off-path attackers just as plain TCP is. Possible attacks include desynchronizing the underlying TCP stream, injecting RST or FIN segments, and forging rekey bits. These attacks will cause a tcpcrypt connection to hang or fail with an error, but not in any circumstance where plain TCP could continue uncorrupted. Implementations MUST give higher-level software a way to distinguish such errors from a clean end-of-stream (indicated by an authenticated FINp bit) so that applications can avoid semantic truncation attacks.
There is no "key confirmation" step in tcpcrypt. This is not required because tcpcrypt's threat model includes the possibility of a connection to an adversary. If key negotiation is compromised and yields two different keys, all subsequent frames will be ignored due to failed integrity checks, causing the application's connection to hang. This is not a new threat because in plain TCP, an active attacker could have modified sequence and acknowledgement numbers to hang the connection anyway.
Tcpcrypt uses short-lived public keys to provide forward secrecy. All currently specified key agreement schemes involve ECDHE-based key agreement, meaning a new key can be efficiently computed for each connection. If implementations reuse these parameters, they SHOULD limit the lifetime of the private parameters, ideally to no more than two minutes.
Attackers cannot force passive openers to move forward in their session resumption chain without guessing the content of the resumption identifier, which will be difficult without key knowledge.
Tcpcrypt transforms a shared pseudo-random key (PRK) into cryptographic session keys for each direction. Doing so requires an asymmetry in the protocol, as the key derivation function must be perturbed differently to generate different keys in each direction. Tcpcrypt includes other asymmetries in the roles of the two hosts, such as the process of negotiating algorithms (e.g., proposing vs. selecting cipher suites).
Many hosts implement TCP Keep-Alives [RFC1122] as an option for applications to ensure that the other end of a TCP connection still exists even when there is no data to be sent. A TCP Keep-Alive segment carries a sequence number one prior to the beginning of the send window, and may carry one byte of "garbage" data. Such a segment causes the remote side to send an acknowledgment.
Unfortunately, tcpcrypt cannot cryptographically verify Keep-Alive acknowledgments. Hence, an attacker could prolong the existence of a session at one host after the other end of the connection no longer exists. (Such an attack might prevent a process with sensitive data from exiting, giving an attacker more time to compromise a host and extract the sensitive data.)
Thus, tcpcrypt specifies a way to stimulate the remote host to send verifiably fresh and authentic data, described in Section 3.9.
The TCP keep-alive mechanism has also been used for its effects on intermediate nodes in the network, such as preventing flow state from expiring at NAT boxes or firewalls. As these purposes do not require the authentication of endpoints, implementations may safely accomplish them using either the existing TCP keep-alive mechanism or tcpcrypt's verified keep-alive mechanism.
We are grateful for contributions, help, discussions, and feedback from the TCPINC working group, including Marcelo Bagnulo, David Black, Bob Briscoe, Jana Iyengar, Tero Kivinen, Mirja Kuhlewind, Yoav Nir, Christoph Paasch, Eric Rescorla, and Kyle Rose.
This work was funded by gifts from Intel (to Brad Karp) and from Google; by NSF award CNS-0716806 (A Clean-Slate Infrastructure for Information Flow Control); by DARPA CRASH under contract #N66001-10-2-4088; and by the Stanford Secure Internet of Things Project.
Dan Boneh and Michael Hamburg were co-authors of the draft that became this document.
| [RFC1122] | Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, DOI 10.17487/RFC1122, October 1989. |
| [tcpcrypt] | Bittau, A., Hamburg, M., Handley, M., Mazieres, D. and D. Boneh, "The case for ubiquitous transport-level encryption", USENIX Security , 2010. |