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

[Herbert Xu]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 12:08:36PM +1000, James Morris wrote:
> 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.

I think Jason's patch is definitely an improvement over the status quo.

Cheers,
-- 
Email: Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt