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Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

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Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#111
post #2

Two nits, both pedantic: An attack on SHA1 that makes certificate forgery viable within the next few years doesn't seem very likely, although over the long term it might be. The attack on SHA1 isn't like the attacks on RSA-1024; my sense is that the literature already knows how to break RSA-1024 given enough compute, but does not know how to do that with SHA1. Further, factoring RSA-1024 provides an attacker with a t…

my sense is that the literature already knows how to break RSA-1024 given enough compute

"given enough compute", we can break any crypto just with pure bruteforce, although in practice I believe there's a point at which the amount of power that would be required becomes physically impossible due to the limits of computation within the universe (i.e. Moore's Law will definitely end sometime). To me, that says using extremely large hash sizes can keep things quite secure - even attacks that reduce complexity by many orders of magnitude could be impossible in practice - e.g. a 2048-bit hash for which a 2^500 complexity attack is found won't be any less practically secure.

...unless we somehow discover that P = NP, in which case the world could become a very interesting place...

Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#113
I'm not saying the conclusion is wrong, but the reasoning likely is: there's a huge difference between a collision attack and a so-called second pre-image attack [1]. To impersonate a website protected with an SHA-1 certificate you'd have to mount the second kind.

> Walker's estimate suggested then that a SHA-1 collision would cost $2M in 2012, $700K in 2015, $173K in 2018, and $43K in 2021.

If you adjust those cost estimates for the fact that a second pre-image is needed they look more something like this:

An SHA-1 second pre-image attack (needed to e.g. impersonate an SSL protected website) would likely cost about 10^26 USD in 2021... By comparison world GDP is only about 10^14 USD.

Better safe than sorry though. :)

1. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/pkix/current/msg30395....

Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#114
post #103
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows XP SP 2 (SP 3 is fine) and early Android, I believe, are the clients that don't support certs later than SHA-1.

It has to be so frustrating to Google that the people responsible for Android make it so hard for users to upgrade to versions that support SHA-2.

It's not Google's fault the telecoms cripple every phone they sell.

Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#116
post #99
post #2

Two nits, both pedantic: An attack on SHA1 that makes certificate forgery viable within the next few years doesn't seem very likely, although over the long term it might be. The attack on SHA1 isn't like the attacks on RSA-1024; my sense is that the literature already knows how to break RSA-1024 given enough compute, but does not know how to do that with SHA1. Further, factoring RSA-1024 provides an attacker with a t…

I don't know if "10 years" falls in your definition of "next few years". For a viable rogue CA attack, you need a chosen-prefix attack. Current best research ( https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/EC13-S.pdf ) shows it should take 2^77.1 SHA-1 compression calls to do a chosen-prefix attack. Say this is improved to 2^65 within the next 10 years. Right now a good GPU (AMD R9 290) can do 3 billion SHA-1 compression c…

I agree.

Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#117
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the OP: If you poke around Google's SSL configuration, you'll see that (!) they use certificates signed with SHA-1. But each certificate expires in 3 months, a short-lived window that reduces the chances that a certificate could be forged, while they migrate to SHA-2 in 2015.

If going SHA-2 only requires a request flag, why so long for a transition? Is there some downside (e.g. old clients that don't support it) that holds Google off?

Lots of old clients still out there, including people who don't have the option to upgrade.

A couple of years ago we tried upgrading our certificate to SHA-2, and rolled it back within an hour, because it broke the site for several of our customers.

It might work now; IE6 users have (finally!) dropped to about 0, but we certainly have tons of IE7 users, and I'll have to look up versions of Windows they're using before we try it again.

We work with hospitals whose IT departments who need to control changes to their computing environments extremely carefully, and upgrades are unfortunately quite expensive and difficult for these kinds of environments.

Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#118

A while back I launched a SSL scanner [1] and got tons of feedback from people at Facebook, Google, Microsoft. The most divisive item was how to represent SHA1 deprecation. The OPs article doesn't really touch on it, but the reason that Google and everyone else haven't moved on is that there still exist a sizeable number of clients that can only accept SHA1 (and will error on anything else). I actually suspect that l…

> I actually suspect that large sites like Facebook, etc will maintain multiple certs at the different levels and dynamically serve the best one up that the client can support. How would you do that? When the TLS connection is established you know nothing about the client except its IP address. All of the interesting information about the browser is transported via the HTTP stream which is tunneled inside the TLS con…

I think they would use the list of ciphers the browser says it will accept in the TLS handshake, or maybe TLS version.

Anything from ClientHello could be used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Basic_...

Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#119
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If going SHA-2 only requires a request flag, why so long for a transition? Is there some downside (e.g. old clients that don't support it) that holds Google off?

Lots of old clients still out there, including people who don't have the option to upgrade. A couple of years ago we tried upgrading our certificate to SHA-2, and rolled it back within an hour, because it broke the site for several of our customers. It might work now; IE6 users have (finally!) dropped to about 0, but we certainly have tons of IE7 users, and I'll have to look up versions of Windows they're using befor…

Fortunately, hopefully most enterprises moved to SP3 years ago. MS officially dropped XP SP2 support in mid 2010, and while MS does do Custom Support for older service packs, of course I hope no one is relying on it now. I think Custom Support for WinXP SP3 is IE8 only after the first year BTW.

Re: Why Google is Hurrying the Web to Kill SHA-1

#120
post #99
post #2

Two nits, both pedantic: An attack on SHA1 that makes certificate forgery viable within the next few years doesn't seem very likely, although over the long term it might be. The attack on SHA1 isn't like the attacks on RSA-1024; my sense is that the literature already knows how to break RSA-1024 given enough compute, but does not know how to do that with SHA1. Further, factoring RSA-1024 provides an attacker with a t…

I don't know if "10 years" falls in your definition of "next few years". For a viable rogue CA attack, you need a chosen-prefix attack. Current best research ( https://marc-stevens.nl/research/papers/EC13-S.pdf ) shows it should take 2^77.1 SHA-1 compression calls to do a chosen-prefix attack. Say this is improved to 2^65 within the next 10 years. Right now a good GPU (AMD R9 290) can do 3 billion SHA-1 compression c…

Firstly, GPUs haven't followed More.

Secondly, multiple sha1 ASIC exists.

Thirdly, WebGL has made it trivial to gain vast GPU resources. 20,000 viewers for two hours can be bought for $20.

Fourthly, I don't care.

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