From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:08:25 +0200
From: Mechiel Lukkien <mechiel@xs4all.nl>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Message-ID: <20090410120824.GC8655@knaagkever.ueber.net>
References: <20090410084102.GG4823@masters6.cs.jhu.edu>
	<679b27481fefe8cdfa8b7838625ee32b@quanstro.net>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] exportfs security question
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On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 07:48:54AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote:
> > We haven't brought up SSL yet, so Eve can read our exchanged random
> > numbers... now these values get shoved into SHA-1 (along with the 56 bits of
> > entropy from Kn derived from p9any authentication) before being used to make
> > the SSL secrets... but... that doesn't seem to matter much.  Eve sees the
> > first four, the last four, and knows 1/8th of the middle 8 bytes (p9sk1 gets
> > an 8-byte secret by unpacking a 7-byte DES key) of the input to the SHA-1
> > function, meaning...  Eve still only needs to do at most 2^56 SHA-1
> > operations to search for our SSL secrets [1]...  OK, so Eve can't have
> > precomputed tables to help her out, fair enough, but this still seems
> > dubious.
> >
> > Subsequently, having done all of this, the secrets fed into the SSL stream
> > contain only 80 bits of entropy, which is itself somewhat small (esp.
> > relative to the ability of rc4 to use 128 or even 256 bit keys).
>
> eve has to do zero computation to get at your plan-text stream.
> i think they call it transport security for a reason. :-)

he probably means eve as in eavesdropper.  alice, bob, eve & friends.

mjl