Re: [GIT PULL] KEYS: Fixes and crypto fixes

[James Morris]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2017, Eric Biggers wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 09:14:58AM +1000, James Morris wrote:
> > On Wed, 27 Sep 2017, David Howells wrote:
> > 
> > >  (2) Fixing big_key to use safe crypto from Jason A. Donenfeld.
> > > 
> > 
> > I'm concerned about the lack of crypto review mentioned by Jason -- I 
> > wonder if we can get this rewrite any more review from crypto folk.
> > 
> > Also, are there any tests for this code?  If not, it would be good to make 
> > some.
> > 
> 
> There is a test for the big_key key type in the keyutils test suite.  I also
> manually tested Jason's change.  And as far as I can tell there isn't actually a
> whole lot to test besides adding a big_key larger than BIG_KEY_FILE_THRESHOLD
> bytes, reading it back, and verifying that the data is unchanged --- since that
> covers the code that was changed.  An earlier version of the patch produced a
> warning with CONFIG_DEBUG_SG=y since it put the aead_request on the stack, but
> that's been fixed.
> 

Ok, thanks a lot.

> It would be great if someone else would comment on the crypto too, but for what
> it's worth I'm satisfied with the crypto changes.  GCM is a much better choice
> than ECB as long as we don't repeat (key, IV) pairs --- which we don't.  And in
> any case ECB mode makes no sense in this context; you'd need a *very* good
> reason to actually choose to encrypt something with ECB mode.  Unfortunately it
> tends to be a favorite of people who don't understand encryption modes...

Adding Herbert.


-- 
James Morris
<jmorris@xxxxxxxxx>