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When comparing MAC hashes, AEAD authentication tags, or other hash
values in the context of authentication or integrity checking, it
is important not to leak timing information to a potential attacker,
i.e. when communication happens over a network.
Bytewise memory comparisons (such as memcmp) are usually optimized so
that they return a nonzero value as soon as a mismatch is found. E.g,
on x86_64/i5 for 512 bytes this can be ~50 cyc for a full mismatch
and up to ~850 cyc for a full match (cold). This early-return behavior
can leak timing information as a side channel, allowing an attacker to
iteratively guess the correct result.
This patch adds a new method crypto_memneq ("memory not equal to each
other") to the crypto API that compares memory areas of the same length
in roughly "constant time" (cache misses could change the timing, but
since they don't reveal information about the content of the strings
being compared, they are effectively benign). Iow, best and worst case
behaviour take the same amount of time to complete (in contrast to
memcmp).
Note that crypto_memneq (unlike memcmp) can only be used to test for
equality or inequality, NOT for lexicographical order. This, however,
is not an issue for its use-cases within the crypto API.
We tried to locate all of the places in the crypto API where memcmp was
being used for authentication or integrity checking, and convert them
over to crypto_memneq.
crypto_memneq is declared noinline, placed in its own source file,
and compiled with optimizations that might increase code size disabled
("Os") because a smart compiler (or LTO) might notice that the return
value is always compared against zero/nonzero, and might then
reintroduce the same early-return optimization that we are trying to
avoid.
Using #pragma or __attribute__ optimization annotations of the code
for disabling optimization was avoided as it seems to be considered
broken or unmaintained for long time in GCC [1]. Therefore, we work
around that by specifying the compile flag for memneq.o directly in
the Makefile. We found that this seems to be most appropriate.
As we use ("Os"), this patch also provides a loop-free "fast-path" for
frequently used 16 byte digests. Similarly to kernel library string
functions, leave an option for future even further optimized architecture
specific assembler implementations.
This was a joint work of James Yonan and Daniel Borkmann. Also thanks
for feedback from Florian Weimer on this and earlier proposals [2].
[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2012-07/msg00211.html
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/10/131
Signed-off-by: James Yonan <james@openvpn.net>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <dborkman@redhat.com>
Cc: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
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