Using the Nitrokey HSM with GnuTLS applications

The Nitrokey HSM is an open hardware security module, in the form of a smart card token, which is used to isolate a server's private key from the application. That is, if you have an HTTPS server, such a hardware security module will prevent an attacker which temporarily obtained privileged access on the server (e.g., via an exploit like heartbleed), from copying the server's private key, allowing for impersonating it. See my previous post for a more elaborate discussion on that defense mechanism.

The rest of this post will explain how you can initialize this token and utilize it from GnuTLS applications, and in the process explain more about smart card and HSM usage in applications. For the official (and more advanced) Nitrokey setup instructions and tips you can see this OpenSC page, another interesting guide is here.

HSMs and smart cards

 

Nitrokey HSM is something between a smart card and an HSM. However, there is no real distinction between smart cards and Hardware Security Module from a software perspective. Hardware-wise one expects better (in terms of cost to defeat) tamper-resistance on HSMs, and at the same time sufficient performance for server loads. An HSM module is typically installed on PCI slots, USB, while smart cards are mainly USB or via a card reader.

On the software-side both smart cards and HSMs are accessed the same way, over the PKCS#11 API. That is an API which abstracts keys from operations, i.e., the API doesn't require direct access to the private key data to complete the operation. Most crypto libraries today support this API directly as GnuTLS and NSS do, or via an external module like OpenSSL (i.e., via engine_pkcs11).

Each HSM or smart card, comes with a "driver", i.e., a PKCS#11 module, which one had to specify on legacy applications. On modern systems, which have p11-kit, the available drivers are registered with p11-kit and applications can obtain and utilize them on run-time (see below for more information). For Nitrokey the OpenSC driver is being used, a driver for almost every other smart card that is supported on Linux.

If you are familiar with old applications, you would have noticed that objects were referred to as "slot1_1", which meant the first object on the first slot of the driver, or "1:1", and several other obscure methods depending on the application. The "slots" notion is an internal to PKCS#11, which is inherently unstable (re-inserting may change the slot number assignment), thus these methods to refer to objects cannot accommodate easily for multiple cards, or for referring to an object within a specific card if multiple are present, nor to easily utilize cards which are under the different drivers. More recent applications support PKCS#11 URIs, a method to identify tokens, and objects within the token which is unique system-wide; the URI looks like:

pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM;object=my-ecc-key;type=private

For GnuTLS applications, only PKCS#11 URIs can be used to refer to objects.

Driver setup and token discovery

 

On a typical Linux system which runs the pcscd server, and has opensc and p11-kit properly installed the following command should list the nitrokey token once inserted.

    $ p11tool --list-tokens

One of the entries printed should be something like the following.

Token 5:
    URL: pkcs11:model=PKCS%2315%20emulated;manufacturer=www.CardContact.de;serial=DENK0100424;token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29
    Type: Hardware token
    Manufacturer: www.CardContact.de
    Model: PKCS#15 emulated
    Serial: DENK0100424
    Module: /usr/lib64/pkcs11/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so

The above information contains the identifying PKCS#11 URI of the token as well as information about the manufacturer and the driver library used. The PKCS#11 URI is a standardized unique identifier of tokens and objects stored within a token. If you do not see that information, verify that you have all of pcsc-lite, pcsc-lite-ccid, opensc, gnutls and p11-kit installed. If that's the case, you will need to register the opensc token to make it known to p11-kit manually (modern distributions take care of this step). This can be done with the following commands as administrator.

    # mkdir -p /etc/pkcs11/modules
    # echo "module: /usr/lib64/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so" >/etc/pkcs11/modules/opensc.conf

It is implied that the your system's libdir for PKCS#11 drivers  should be used instead of the "/usr/lib64/pkcs11" path used above. Alternatively, one could append the --provider parameter on the p11tool command, to explicitly specify the driver, as in the following example. For the rest of this text we assume a properly configured p11-kit and omit the --provider parameter.

    $ p11tool --provider /usr/lib64/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so --list-tokens

Token initialization

 

An HSM token prior to usage needs to be initialized, and be provided two PINs. One PIN is for operations requiring administrative (security officer in PKCS#11 jargon) access, and the second (the user PIN ) is for normal token usage. To initialize use the following command, with the PKCS#11 URL listed by the 'p11tool --list-tokens' command; in the following text we will use $URL to refer to that.

    $ p11tool --initialize "$URL"

Alternatively, when the driver supplied supports a single card, the URL can be specified as "pkcs11:" as shown below.

    $ p11tool --provider  /usr/lib64/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so --initialize "pkcs11:"

The initialization commands above will ask to setup the security officer's PIN, which for nitrokey HSM is by default "3537363231383830". At the initialization process, the user PIN will also be asked. The user PIN is PIN which must be provided by applications and users, in order to use the card. Note that the command above (prior to GnuTLS 3.5.6) will ask for the administrator's PIN twice, once for initialization and once for setting the user PIN.

Key and certificate generation

It is possible to either copy an existing key on the card, or generate a key in it, a key which cannot be extracted. To generate an elliptic curve (ECDSA) key use the following command.

    $ p11tool --label "my-key" --login --generate-ecc "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29"

The above command will generate an ECDSA key which will be identified by the name set by the label. That key can be then by fully identified by the PKCS#11 URL "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29;object=my-key;type=private". If the command was successful, the command above will list two objects, the private key and the public key.

    $ p11tool --login --list-all "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29"

Note that both objects share the same ID but have different type. As this key cannot be extracted from the token, we need to utilize the following commands to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR).

    $ certtool --generate-request --load-privkey "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29;object=my-key;type=private" --outfile cert.csr

After providing the required information to certtool, it will generate a certificate request on cert.csr file. Alternatively, to generate a self-signed certificate, one can replace the '--generate-request' parameter with the '--generate-self-signed'.

The above generated certificate signining request, will allow to get a real certificate to use for the key stored in the token. That can be generated either with letsencrypt or a local PKI. As the details vary, I'm skipping this step, and I'm assuming a certificate is generated somehow.

After the certificate is made available, one can write it in the token. That step is not strictly required, but in several scenarios it simplifies key/cert management by storing them at the same token. One can store the certificate, using the following command.

    $ p11tool --login --write --load-certificate cert.pem --label my-cert --id "PUBKEY-ID" "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29"

Note that specifying the PUBKEY-ID is not required, but it is generally recommended for certificate objects to match the ID of the public key object listed previously with the --list-all command. If the IDs do not match some (non-GnuTLS) applications may fail to utilize the key. The certificate stored in the token will have the PKCS#11 URL "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29;object=my-cert;type=cert".

Testing the generated keys

Now that both the key and the certificate are present in the token, one can utilize their PKCS#11 URL in any GnuTLS application in place of filenames. That is if the application is asking for a certificate file, enter "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29;object=my-cert;type=cert", and for private key "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29;object=my-key;type=private".

The following example will run a test HTTPS server using the keys above.

    $ gnutls-serv --port 4443 --http --x509certfile "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29;object=my-cert;type=cert" --x509keyfile "pkcs11:token=SmartCard-HSM20%28UserPIN%29;object=my-key;type=private;pin-value=1234"

That will setup a server which answers on port 4443 and will utilize the certificate and key on the token to perform TLS authentication. Note that the command above, demonstrates the use of the "pin-value" URI element. That element, specifies the object PIN on command line allowing for non-interactive token access.

Applicability and performance

While the performance of this HSM will most likely not allow you to utilize it in busy servers, it may be a sufficient solution for a private server, VPN, a testing environment or demo. On client side, it can certainly provide a sufficient solution to protect the client assigned private keys. The advantage a smart card provides to OTP, is the fact that it is simpler to provision remotely, with the certificate request method shown above. That can be automated, at least in theory, when a protocol implementation of SCEP is around. In practice, SCEP is well established in the proprietary world, but it is hard to find free software applications taking advantage of it.

Converting your application to use PKCS#11

A typical application written to use GnuTLS as TLS back-end library should be able to use smart cards and HSM tokens out of the box. The only requirement is for the applications to use the high-level file loading functions, which can load files or PKCS#11 URIs when provided. The only new requirement is for the application to obtain the PIN required for accessing the token, that can be done interactively using the PIN callbacks, or via the PKCS#11 URI "pin-value" element. For source examples, I'll refer you to GnuTLS documentation.

• Client example utilizing PIN callbacks
• Server example which loads PKCS#11 URIs

Some indicative applications which I'm aware they can use tokens via PKCS#11 URIs transparently, and can be used for testing, are mod_gnutls, lighttpd2, and openconnect.

A brief look at the Linux-kernel random generator interfaces

Most modern operating systems provide a cryptographic pseudo-random number generator (CPRNG), as part of their OS kernel, intended to be used by applications involving cryptographic operations. Linux is no exception in that, and in fact it was the first operating system that actually introduced a CPRNG into the kernel. However, there is much mystery around these interfaces. The manual page is quite unclear on its suggestions, while there is a web-site dedicated to debunking myths about these interfaces, which on a first read contradicts the manual page.

In this post, triggered by my recent attempt to understand the situation and update the Linux manual page, I'll make a brief overview of these interfaces. Note that, this post will not get into the insights of a cryptographic pseudo-random generator (CPRNG); for that, consider reading this article. I will go through these interfaces, intentionally staying on the high-level, without considering internal details, and discuss their usefulness for an application or library that requires access to such a CPRNG.

• /dev/random: a file which if read from, will output data from the kernel CPRNG. Reading from this file blocks once the kernel (using some a little arbitrary metric) believes not enough random events have been accumulated since the last use (I know that this is not entirely accurate, but the description is sufficient for this post).
• /dev/urandom: a file which if read from, will provide data from the kernel CPRNG. Reading from /dev/urandom will never block.
• getrandom(): A system call which provides random data from the kernel CPRNG. It will block only when the CPRNG is not yet initialized.

A software engineer who would like to seed a PRNG or generate random encryption keys, and reads the manual page random(4) carefully, he will most likely be tempted to use /dev/random, as it is described as "suitable for uses that need very high quality randomness such as ... key generation". In practice /dev/random cannot be relied on, because it requires large amounts of random events to be accumulated in order to provide few bytes of random data to running processes. Using it for key generation (e.g, for ssh keys during first boot) is most likely going to convert the first boot process to a coin flip; heads and system is up, tails and the system is left hanging waiting for random events. This (old) issue with a mail service process hanging for more than 20 minutes prior to doing any action, illustrates the impact of this device to real-world applications which need to generate fresh keys on startup.

On the other hand, the device /dev/urandom provides access to the same random generator, but will never block, nor apply any restrictions to the amount of new random events that must be read in order to provide any output. That is quite natural given that modern random generators when initially seeded can provide enormous amounts of output prior to being considered broken (in an informational-theory sense). So should we use only /dev/urandom today?

There is a catch. Unfortunately /dev/urandom has a quite serious flaw. If used early on the boot process when the random number generator of the kernel is not fully initialized, it will still output data. How random are the output data is system-specific, and in modern platforms, which provide specialized CPU instructions to provide random data, that is less of an issue. However, the situation where ssh keys are generated prior to the kernel pool being initialized, can be observed in virtual machines which have not been given access to the host's random generator.

Another, though not as significant, issue is the fact that both of these interfaces require a file descriptor to operate. That, on a first view, may not seem like a flaw. In that case consider the following scenarios:

• The application calls chroot() prior to initializing the crypto library; the chroot environment doesn't contain any of /dev/*random.
• To avoid the issue above, the crypto library opens /dev/urandom on an library constructor and stores the descriptor for later use. The application closes all open file descriptors on startup.

Both are real-world scenarios observed over the years of developing the GnuTLS library. The latter scenario is of particular concern since, if the application opens few files, the crypto library may never realize that the /dev/urandom file descriptor has been closed and replaced by another file. That may result to reading from an arbitrary file to obtain randomness. Even though one can introduce checks to detect such case, that is a particularly hard issue to spot, and requires inefficient and complex code to address.

That's where the system call getrandom() fits. Its operation is very similar to /dev/urandom, that is, it provides non-blocking access to kernel CPRNG. In addition, it requires no file descriptor, and will also block prior to the kernel random generator being initialized. Given that it addresses, the issues of /dev/urandom identified above, that seems indeed like the interface that should be used by modern libraries and applications. In fact, if you use new versions of libgcrypt and GnuTLS today, they take advantage of this API (though that change wasn't exactly a walk in the park).

On the other hand, getrandom() is still a low-level interface, and may not be suitable to be used directly by applications expecting a safe high-level interface. If one carefully reads its manual page, he will notice that the API may return less data than the requested (if interrupted by signal), and today this system call is not even wrapped by glibc. That means that can be used only via the syscall() interface. An illustration of (safe) usage of this system call, is given below.

#include <sys/syscall.h>
#include <errno.h>
#define getrandom(dst,s,flags) syscall(SYS_getrandom, (void*)dst, (size_t)s, (unsigned int)flags)

static int safe_getrandom(void *buf, size_t buflen, unsigned int flags)
{
  ssize_t left = buflen;
  ssize_t ret;
  uint8_t *p = buf;
  while (left > 0) {
   ret = getrandom(p, left, flags);
   if (ret == -1) {
    if (errno != EINTR)
     return ret;
   }
   if (ret > 0) {
    left -= ret;
    p += ret;
   }
  }
  return buflen;
}

The previous example code assumes that the Linux kernel supports this system call. For portable code which may run on kernels without it, a fallback to /dev/urandom should also be included.

From the above, it is apparent that using the Linux-kernel provided interfaces to access the kernel CPRNG, is not easy. The old (/dev/*random) interfaces APIs are difficult to use correctly, and while the getrandom() call eliminates several of their issues, it is not straightforward to use, and is not available in Linux kernels prior to 3.17. Hence, if applications require access to a CPRNG, my recommendation would be to avoid using the kernel interfaces directly, and use any APIs provided by their crypto library of choice. That way the complexity of system-discovery and any other peculiarities of these interfaces will be hidden. Some hints and tips are shown in the Fedora defensive coding guide (which may be a bit out-of-date but still a good source of information).

Restricting the scope of CA certificates

The granting of an intermediate CA certificate to a surveillance firm generated quite some fuss. Setting theories aside, the main reason behind that outcry, is the fact that any intermediate CA certificate trusted by the browsers has unlimited powers to certify any web site on the Internet. Servers can protect themselves against an arbitrary CA generating a valid certificate for their web site, using certificate pinning, but there is very little end-users can do. In practice, end-users either trust the whole bundled CA list in their browser/system or not.

An option for end-users is to utilize trust on first use, but that is not a widespread practice, and few software, besides for SSH, support it. A way for me as a user to defend against a believed to be rogue CA, is by disabling or removing that CA from my trusted bundle. But what if I trust that CA for a particular web site or domain, but not for the whole Internet?

On this post I'll try to provide more information on some lesser documented aspects of p11-kit, which provide additional control over the CA certificate bundle in a system. That is, I'll explain how we can do better than disabling CAs, and how we can restrict CAs to particular domains. The following instructions are limited to Fedora 22+ which has deployed a shared trust database for certificates based on p11-kit. This database, is not only an archive of trusted certificates, but also provides the option to attach additional attributes to CA certificates in the form of PKIX extensions. These extensions are called stapled extensions in p11-kit jargon and they override any extensions available in the trust certificates. That, allows to enforce additional restrictions to the purpose and scope of a certificate.

I'll attempt to demonstrate this feature using an example. Let's consider the case where your employer's IT department provided you with a CA certificate to trust for communications within the company. Let's also assume that the company's internal domain is called "example.com". In that scenario as a user I'd like to restrict the provided CA certificate to example.com domain to prevent anyone with access to the corporate private key from being able to hijack any connection outside the company scope. This is not only out of paranoia against a potential corporate big-brother but also to keep a good security practice and avoid having master keys. A stolen corporate CA key which is trusted for everything under the sun provides a potential attacker not only with access to company's internal communication, but also with access to Internet communication of any corporate user.

How would we install such certificate in a way that it is restricted only to example.com? Assuming that the CA certificate is provided at the example.com-root.pem file, the following command will add the company's certificate to the trusted list.

$ sudo trust anchor example.com-root.pem

That will create a file in /etc/pki/ca-trust/source containing the CA certificate (for more information on adding and removing CA certificates in Fedora see the update-ca-trust manpage).

If we edit this file we will see something like the following.

[p11-kit-object-v1]
trusted: true
x-distrusted: false
private: false
certificate-category: authority
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIDsDCCAxmgAwIBAgIBATANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADCBnTELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMx
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

This contains the certificate of the CA as well as various basic flags set to it.
How can we now attach a stapled extension to it?

We need to add another object in that database containing the extension. But let's see the process step by step. First we need to extract the certificate's public key because that's how p11-kit identifies existing objects. A command to achieve that is the following:

$ certool --pubkey-info --infile example.com-root.pem --outfile example.com-pubkey.pem

 The output file will contain a public key in PEM format (identifiable by the "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----" header). We now edit the p11-kit file in  /etc/pki/ca-trust/source containing our certificate and append the following.

[p11-kit-object-v1]
class: x-certificate-extension
label: "Example.com CA restriction"
object-id: 2.5.29.30
value: "%30%1a%06%03%55%1d%1e%04%13%30%11%a0%0f%30%0d%82%0b%65%78%61%6d%70%6c%65%2e%63%6f%6d"
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
...
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----

Where the public key part is copied from the example.com-pubkey.pem file.

This added object, is a stapled extension containing a PKIX name constraints extension which allows this CA to be used for certificates under the "example.com" domain. If you attempt to connect to a host with a certificate of this CA you will get the following error:

$ gnutls-cli www.no-example.com
...
Status: The certificate is NOT trusted. The certificate chain violates the signer's constraints.
*** PKI verification of server certificate failed...

Note that, although NSS and openssl applications check some extensions (such as key purpose) from this trust database, they do not consider the name constraints extension. This may change in the future, but currently only GnuTLS applications under Fedora will honor this extension. The reason it works under Fedora distribution is because GnuTLS is compiled using the --with-default-trust-store-pkcs11="pkcs11:" configuration option which makes it use the p11-kit trust DB directly.

A question at this point, after seeing the p11-kit object format, is how can we generate the "value" listed above containing the desired constraints? The value contains a DER encoded certificate extension which corresponds to the object identifier "object-id" field. In this case the object-id field contains the object identifier for NameConstraints extension (2.5.29.30).

Unfortunately there are no available tools to generate this value, that I'm aware of. I created a sample application which will generate a valid name constraints value to be set above. The tool can be found at this github repository.

After you compile, run:

$ ./nconstraints mydomain.com myotherdomain.com
%30%30%06%03%55%1d%1e%04%29%30%27%a0%25%30%0e%82%0c%6d%79%64%6f%6d%61%69%6e%2e%63%6f%6d%30%13%82%11%6d%79%6f%74%68%65%72%64%6f%6d%61%69%6e%2e%63%6f%6d

and as you see, this command will provide the required string.

Happy hacking!

An overview of the new features in GnuTLS 3.5.0

Few minutes ago I've released GnuTLS 3.5.0. This is the stable-next branch of GnuTLS which will replace the stable GnuTLS 3.4.x branch within a year. It is fully backwards compatible and comes with several new features, the most prominent I'll summarize later on this post.

However, before going on the features let me describe the current trends in the applied cryptography field, to provide an idea of the issues considered during development, and to give context for the included changes. For the really impatient to see the features, jump to last section.

Non-NIST algorithms

After the dual EC-DRBG NIST fiasco, requests to avoid relying blindly on NIST approved/standardized algorithms for the Internet infrastructure, became louder and louder (for the new in the crypto field NIST is USA's National Institute of Standards and Technology). Even though NIST with its standardizations has certainly aided the Internet security technologies, the Snowden revelations that NSA via NIST had pushed for the backdoor-able by design EC-DRBG random generator (RNG), and required standard compliant applications to include the backdoor,  made a general distrust apparent in organizations like IETF or IRTF. Furthermore, more public scrutiny of NSA's contributions followed. You can see a nice example on the reactions to NSA's attempt to standardize extensions to the TLS protocol which will expose more state of the generator; an improvement which would have enabled the EC-DRBG backdoor to operate in a more efficient way under TLS.

Given the above, several proposals were made to no longer rely on NIST's recommendations for elliptic curve cryptography or otherwise. That is, both their elliptic curve parameters as well as their standardized random generators, etc. The first to propose alternative curves to IETF was the German BSI which proposed the brainpool curves. Despite their more open design, they didn't receive much attention by implementers. The most current proposal to replace the NIST curves comes from the Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG) and proposes two curves, curve25519 and curve448. These, in addition to being not-proposed-by-NIST, can have a very fast implementation in modern systems and can be implemented to operate in constant time, something that is of significant value for digital signatures generated by servers. These curves are being considered for addition in the next iteration of the TLS elliptic curve document for key exchange, and there is also a proposal to use them for PKIX/X.509 certificate digital signatures under the EdDSA signature scheme.

For the non-NIST symmetric cipher replacements the story is a bit different. The NIST-standardized AES algorithm is still believed to be a very strong cipher, and will stay with us for quite long time especially since it is already part of the x86-64 CPU instruction set. However, for CPUs that do not have that instruction set, encryption performance is not particularly impressing. That, when combined with the common in TLS GCM authenticated-encryption construction which cannot be easily optimized without a specific (e.g., PCLMUL) instruction set being present, put certain systems on a disadvantage. Prior to RC4 being known to be completely broken, this was the cipher to switch your TLS connection to, for such systems. However, after RC4 became a cipher to display on a museum, a new choice was needed. I have written about the need for it back in 2013, and it seems today we are very close to having Chacha20 with Poly1305 as authenticator being standardized for use in the TLS protocol. That is an authenticated-encryption construction defined in RFC7539, a construction that can outperform both RC4 and AES on hardware without any cipher-specific acceleration.


Note that in non-NIST reliance trend, in GnuTLS we attempt to stay neutral and decide our next steps on case by case basis. Not everything coming or being standardized from NIST is bad, and algorithms that are not standardized by NIST do not become automatically more secure. Things like EC-DRBG for example were never part of GnuTLS not because we disliked NIST, but because this design didn't make sense for a random generator at all.

No more CBC

TLS from its first incarnation used a flawed CBC construction which led to several flaws over its years, the most prominent being the Lucky13 attack. The protocol in its subsequent updates (TLS 1.1 or 1.2) never fixed these flaws, and instead required the implementers to have a constant time TLS CBC pad decoding, a task which proved to be notoriously hard, as indicated by the latest OpenSSL issue. While there have been claims that some implementations are better than others, this is not the case here. The simple task of reading the CBC padding bytes, which would have been 2-3 lines of code normally, requires tens of lines of code (if not more), and even more extensive testing for correctness/time invariance.  The more code a protocol requires, the more mistakes (remember that better engineers make less mistakes, but they still make mistakes). The protocol is at fault, and the path taken in the next revision of TLS, being 1.3, is to completely drop the CBC mode. In RFC7366 there is a proposal to continue using the CBC ciphersuites in a correct way which would pose no future issues, but the TLS 1.3 revision team though it is better to move away completely from something that has caused so many issues historically.

In addition to that, it seems that all the CBC ciphersuites were banned from being used under HTTP/2.0 even when used under TLS 1.2. That would mean that applications talking HTTP/2.0 would have to disable such ciphersuites or they may fail to interoperate. This move effectively obsoletes the RFC7366 fix for CBC (already implemented in GnuTLS).


Cryptographically-speaking the CBC mode is a perfectly valid mode when used as prescribed. Unfortunately when TLS 1.0 was being designed, the prescription was not widely available or known, and as such it got into to protocol following the "wrong" prescription. As it is now and with all the bad PR around it, it seems we are going to say goodbye to it quite soon.

For the emotionally tied with CBC mode like me (after all it's a nice mode to implement), I'd like to note that it will still live with us under the CCM ciphersuites but on a different role. It now serves as a MAC algorithm. For the non-crypto geeks, CCM is an authenticated encryption mode using counter mode for encryption and CBC-MAC for authentication; it is widely used in the IoT, an acronym for the 'Internet of Things' buzzwords, which typically refers to small embedded devices.

Latency reduction

One of the TLS 1.3 design goals, according to its charter, is to "reduce handshake latency, ..., aiming for one roundtrip for a full handshake and one or zero roundtrip for repeated handshakes". That effort was initiated and tested widely by Google and the TLS false start protocol, which reduced the handshake latency to a single roundtrip, and further demonstrated its benefits with the QUIC protocol. The latter is an attempt to provide multiple connections over a stream into userspace, avoiding any kernel interaction for de-multiplexing or congestion avoidance into user-space. It comes with its own secure communications protocol, which integrates security into the transport layer, as opposed to running a generic secure communications protocol over a transport layer. That's a certainly interesting approach and it remains to be seen whether we will be hearing more of it.

While I was initially a skeptic for modifications to existing cryptographic protocols to achieve low latency, after all such modifications reduce the security guarantees (see this paper for a theoretical attack which can benefit from false-start), the requirement for secure communications with low latency is there to stay. Even though the strive to reduce latency for HTTP communication may not be convincing for everyone, one cannot but imagine a future where high latency scenarios like this are the norm, and low-roundtrip secure communications protocols are required.

Post-quantum cryptography

Since several years it is known that a potential quantum computer can break cryptographic algorithms like RSA or Diffie Hellman as well as the elliptic curve cryptosystems. It was unknown whether a quantum computer at the size where it could break existing cryptosystems could ever exist, however research conducted the last few years provides indications that this is a possibility. NIST hosted a conference on the topic last year, where NSA expressed their plan to prepare for a post-quantum computer future. That is, they no longer believe that elliptic curve cryptography, i.e., their SuiteB profile, is a solution which will be applicable long-term. That is, because due to their use of short keys, the elliptic curve algorithms require a smaller quantum computer to be broken, rather than their finite field counterparts (RSA and Diffie-Hellman). Ironically, it is easier to protect the classical finite field algorithms from quantum computers by increasing the key size (e.g., to 8k or 16k keys) than their more modern counterparts based on elliptic curves.

Other than the approach of increasing the key sizes, today we don't have much tools (i.e., algorithms) to protect key exchanges or digital signatures against a quantum computer future. By the time a quantum computer of 256-qubits or larger roughly 384 qubits is available all today's communication which is based on elliptic curves will be potentially be made available to the owner of such a system. Note, that this future is not expected soon; however, no-one would dare to make a prediction for that. Note also, that the existing systems of D-WAVE are not known to be capable of breaking the current cryptosystems.

Neither IETF or any other standardizing body has any out of the box solution. The most recent development is a NIST competition for quantum computer resistant algorithms, which is certainly a good starting point. It is also a challenge for NIST as it will have to overcome the bad publicity due to the EC-DRBG issue and reclaim its position in technology standardization and driver. Whether they will be successful on that goal, or whether we are going to have new quantum-computer resistant algorithms at all, it remains to be seen.

Finally: the GnuTLS 3.5.0 new features

In case you managed to read all of the above, only few paragraphs are left. Let me summarize the list of prominent changes.

• SHA3 as a certificate signature algorithm. The SHA3 algorithm on all its variations (256-512) was standardized by FIPS 202 publication in August 2015. However, until very recently there were no code points (or more specifically object identifiers) for using it on certificates. Now that they are finally available, we have modified GnuTLS to include support for generating, and verifying certificates with SHA3. For SHA3 support in the TLS protocol either as a signature algorithm or a MAC algorithm we will have to wait further for code points and ciphersuites being available and standardized. Note also, that since GnuTLS 3.5.0 is the first implementation supporting SHA3 on PKIX certificates there have not been any interoperability tests with the generated certificates.
• X25519 (formerly curve25519) for ephemeral EC diffie-hellman key exchange. One quite long-time expected feature we wanted to introduce in GnuTLS is support for alternative to the standardized by NIST elliptic curves. We selected curve25519 originally described in draft-ietf-tls-curve25519-01 and currently in the document which revises the elliptic curve support in TLS draft-ietf-tls-rfc4492bis-07. The latter document --which most likely means the curve will be widely implemented in TLS-- and the advantages of X25519 in terms of performance are the main reasons of selecting it. Note however, that X25519 is a peculiar curve for implementations designed around the NIST curves. That curve cannot be used with ECDSA signatures, although it can be used with a similar algorithm called EdDSA. We don't include EdDSA support for certificates or for the TLS protocol in GnuTLS 3.5.0 as the specification for it has not settled down. We plan to include it in a later 3.5.x release. For curve448 we would have to wait until its specification for digital signatures is settled and is available in the nettle crypto library.
• TLS false start. The TLS 1.2 protocol as well as its earlier versions required a full round-trip time of 2 for its handshake process. Several applications require reduced latency on the first packet and so the False start modification of TLS was defined. The modification allows the client to start transmitting at the time the encryption keys are known to him, but prior to verifying the keys with the server. That reduces the protocol to a single round-trip at the cost of putting the initially transmitted messages of the client at risk. The risk is that any modification of the handshake process by an active attacker will not be detected by the client, something that can lead the client to negotiate weaker security parameters than expected, and so lead to a possible decryption of the initial messages. To prevent that GnuTLS 3.5.0 will not enable false start even if requested when it detects a weak ciphersuite or weak Diffie-Hellman parameters.  The false start functionality can be requested by applications using a flag to gnutls_init().
• New APIs to access the Shawe-Taylor-based provable RSA and DSA parameter generation. While enhancing GnuTLS 3.3.x for Red Hat in order to pass the FIPS140-2 certification, we introduced provable RSA and DSA key generation based on the Shawe-Taylor algorithm, following the FIPS 186-4 recommendations. That algorithm allows generating parameters for the RSA and DSA algorithms from a seed that are provably prime (i.e., no probabilistic primality tests are included). In practice this allows an auditor to verify that the keys and any parameters (e.g., DH) present on a system are generated using a predefined and repeatable process. This code was enabled only when GnuTLS was compiled to enable FIPS140-2 mode, and when the system was put in FIPS140-2 compliance mode. In GnuTLS 3.5.0 this functionality is made available unconditionally from the certtool utility, and a key or DH parameters will be generated using these algorithms when the --provable parameter is specified. That required to modify the storage format for RSA and DSA keys to include the seed, and thus for compatibility purposes this tool will output both old and new formats to allow the use of these parameters from earlier GnuTLS versions and other software.
• Prevent the change of identity on rehandshakes by default.  The TLS rehandshake protocol is typically used for three reasons, (a) rekey on long standing connections, (b) re-authentication and (c) connection upgrade. The rekey use-case is self-explanatory so my focus will be on the latter two. Connection upgrade is when connecting with no client authentication and rehandshaking to provide a client certificate, while re-authentication is when connecting with an identity A, and switching to identity B mid-connection. With that change in GnuTLS the latter use case (re-authentication) is prohibited unless the application has explicitly requested it. The reason is that the majority of applications using GnuTLS are not prepared to handle a connection identity change in the middle of a connection something that depending on the application protocol may lead to issues. Imagine the case where a client authenticates to access a resource, but just before accessing it, the client switches to another identity by presenting another certificate. It is unknown whether applications using GnuTLS are prepared for such changes, and thus we considered important to protect applications by default by requiring applications that utilize re-authentication to explicitly specify it via a flag to gnutls_init(). This change does not affect applications using rehandshake for rekey or connection upgrade.

That concludes my list of the most notable changes, even though this release includes several other ones, including a stricter protocol adherence in corner cases and a significant enhancement of the included test suite. Even though I am the primary contributor, this is a release containing code contributed by more than 20 people which I'd like to personally thank for their contributions.

If you are interested in following our development or helping out, I invite you on our mailing list as well as to our gitlab pages.

Why do we need SSL VPNs today?

One question that has been bothering me for quite a while, is why do we need SSL VPNs? There is an IETF standardized VPN type, IPSec, and given that, why do SSL VPNs still get deployed? Why not just switch everything to IPSec? Moreover, another important question is, since we have IPSec since around 1998, why IPSec hasn't took over the whole market of VPNs? Note that, I'll be using the term SSL even though today it has been replaced by Transport Layer Security (TLS) because the former is widely used to describe this type of VPNs.

These are valid questions, but depending on who you ask you are very likely to get a different answer. I'll try to answer from an SSL VPN developer standpoint.


In the VPN world there are two main types of deployment, the 'site-to-site' and the 'remote access' types. To put it simply, the first is about securing lines between two offices, and the latter is about securing the connection between your remote users and the office. The former type may rely on some minimal PKI deployment or pre-shared keys, but the latter requires integration with some user database, credentials, as well as settings which may be applied individually for each user. In addition the 'remote access' type is often associated with accounting such as keeping track how long a user is connected, how much data has been transferred and so on. That may remind you the kind of accounting used in ppp and dial-up connections, and indeed the same radius-based accounting methods are being used for that purpose.

Both of the 'site-to-site' and 'remote access' setups can be handled by either SSL or IPSec VPNs. However, there are some facts that make some VPNs more suitable for one purpose than the other. In particular, it is believed that SSL VPNs are more suitable for the 'remote access' type of VPNs, while IPSec is unquestionably the solution one would deploy on site-to-site connections. In the next paragraphs I focus on the SSL VPNs and try to list their competitive advantage for the purpose of 'remote access'.

1. Application level. In SSL VPNs the software is at the application level, and that  means that it can provided by the software distributor, or even by the administrator of the server. These VPN applications can be customized for the particular service the user connects to (e.g., include logos, or adjust to the environment the user is used to, or even integrate VPN connectivity with an application). For example the 12vpn.net VPN provider customizes the openconnect-gui application (which is free software) to provide it with a pre-loaded list of the servers they offer to their customers. Several other proprietary solutions use a similar practice, and the server provides the software for the end users.
2. Custom interfaces for authentication. The fact that (most) SSL VPNs run over HTTPS, it provides them with an inherent feature of having complete control over the authentication interface they can display to users. For example in Openconnect VPN we provide the client with XML forms that the user is presented and must fill in, in order to authenticate. That usually covers typical password authentication, one time passwords, group selections, and so on. Other SSL VPN solutions use entirely free form HTML authentication and often only require a browser to log to the network. Others integrate certificate issuing on the first user connection using SCEP, and so on.
3. Enforcing a security policy. Another reason (which I don't quite like or endorse - but happens quite often) is that the VPN client applications, enforce a particular company-wide security policy; e.g., ensure that anti-virus software is running and up to date, prior to connecting to the company LAN. This often is implemented with server provided executables being run by the clients, but that is also a double-edged sword as a VPN server compromise will allow for a compromise of all the clients. In fact the bypass of this "feature" was one of the driving reasons behind the openconnect client.
4. Server side user restrictions. On the server-side the available freedom is comparable with the client side. Because SSL VPNs are on the application layer protocol, they are more flexible in what the connecting client can be restricted to. For example, in openconnect VPN server invidual users, or groups of them can be set into a specific kernel cgroup, i.e., limiting their available CPU time, or can be restricted to a fixed bandwidth in a much more easy way than in any IPSec server.
5. Reliability, i.e., operation over any network. In my opinion, the major reason of existance of SSL VPN applications and servers is that they can operate under any environment. You can be restricted by firewalls, broken networks which block ESP or UDP packets and still be able to connect to your network. That is, because the HTTPS protocol which they rely on, cannot be blocked without having a major part of the Internet go down. That's not something to overlook; a VPN service which works most of the times but not always because the user is within some misconfigured network is unreliable. Reliability is something you need when you want to communicate with colleagues when being on the field, and that's the real problem SSL VPN solve (and the main reason companies and IT administrators usually pay extra to have these features enabled). Furthermore, solutions like Openconnect VPN utilize a combination of HTTPS (TCP) and UDP when available to provide the best possible user experience. It utilizes Datagram TLS over UDP when it detects that this is allowed by network policy (and thus avoiding the TCP over TCP tunneling issues), and falls back to tunneling over HTTPS when the establishment of the DTLS channel is not possible.

That doesn't of course mean that IPSec VPNs are obsolete or not needed for remote access. We are far from that. IPSec VPNs are very well suited for site-to-site links --which are typically on networks under the full control of the deployer-- and are cross platform (if we ignore the IKEv1 vs IKEv2 issues), in the sense that you are very likely to find native servers and clients offered by the operating system. In addition, they possess a significant advantage; because they are integrated with the operating system's IP stack, they utilize the kernel for encryption which removes the need for userspace to kernel space switches. That allows them to serve high bandwidths and spend less CPU time. A kernel side TLS stack, would of course provide SSL VPNs a similar advantage but currently that is work in progress.

As a bottom line, you should chose the best tool for the job at hand based on your requirements and network limitations. I made the case for SSL VPNs, and provided the reasons of why I believe they are still widely deployed and why they'll continue to. If I have already convinced you for the need for SSL VPNs, and you are an administrator working with VPN deployments I'd like to refer you to my FOSDEM 2016 talk about the OpenConnect (SSL) VPN server, on which I describe the reasons I believe it provides a significant advantage over any existing solutions in Linux systems.