WHITEPAPER   [plain text]


Security White Paper For Purple v1
==================================

Author
======

Michael Brouwer <mb@apple.com>


Goals
====

* SSL support with Client Side authentication working.
* SecKeychain API for password storage.

Footprint
=======

To get an idea of how small an SSL implementation can be I compiled
MatrixSSL on ppc and arm.  PPC binary is about 75k and arm is about
100k.  MatrixSSL uses a GPL license so we can't use it directly.
However we could purchase a more liberal license from them and get
additional features available in the commercial version only.  I
didn't investigate yet what those features are or what the pricing is.

We've exceeded the matrixssl size by arriving at less than 100k ppc
binary for sslv2 sslv3 tlsv1 support with aes rc4 3des md5 sha1 rsa
support including the 40 bit export strength suites.

I'm using the above numbers as a target to beat.  Note that MatrixSSL
only does SSLv3 and TLS.  In addition it only supports a cipher suites
using: MD2, MD5, SHA1, 3DES, and RSA.  Also it doesn't support the
weaker "export strength" algorithms, which use smaller (40 bit) key
sizes, so you can't talk to an "export strength" only SSL server.

Currently SecureTransport on Mac OS X supports, in addition to the
above: SSLv2 and cipher suites using RC2, RC4, AES, and Diffie-Hellman
key exchange (both anon and not).  As well as export and non-export
versions of everything.

We can decide later on if we need the algorithms that we support above
the MatrixSSL baseline, using a compile time flag.  Of course each
addition algorithm adds to the code footprint.  Diffie-Hellman in
particular adds extra code to SSL itself as well.  Something else to
consider is whether or not we want to support ECCDSA and SHA2 (256 384
and 512) something that the Federal government is requiring.

SSLv2 support is something else we need to decide whether or not we
need, since supporting it requires a reasonable amount of code as
well.  It's generally considered insecure today, however I don't know
how many websites are out there that only support SSLv2 and not any of
the more modern protocols.  If we decide it's worth dropping SSLv2 to
save space, we should research this.

SSL Milestones
============

* Converted our existing SecureTransport SSL code to C from C++ (done)
* Switch from using CDSA to embedded crypto (done)
* Move to a standalone certificate verification layer (mostly done)
  Once the above are completed we will have a functional standalone
  SSL library without client side auth support. (done)
* Optionally switch from using a generic ASN.1 encoding/decoding library to some
  hand written C code instead which will be much smaller, saving and
  estimated 100k code. (done)

Progress
========

I've started evaluating and collecting crypto algorithms for use with
this SSL library.  So far a number of them are smaller and faster than
the ones provided with MatrixSSL.  However this comparison was done on
PPC as I don't have any  ARM hardware to test on yet.  Once selected
these algorithms should probably also go into the IP-Sec stack in xnu
or potentially even be shared between kernel and user space.

Open Questions
==============

Do we need to support:

* CRLs (could potentially be synced connected to a host computer)
* OCSP certificate checking (requires a live connection).
* Suite B algorithms: AES 128/192/256, SHA2 256/384/512 and
  ECCDSA 256/384/512.

MatrixSSL has no support for either.  The federal government requires
that we support at least one of the above and possibly even both.

Keychain Support
==============

To add client side certificate support we will need a way to securely
store private keys.  For this I propose using a subset interface
similar, or identical to, the current SecKeychain API, but with a
completely new back-end implementation.  This will get us both key and
password storage at the same time.

For the back-end we can either use sqlite3 as the data store layer or
a custom lightweight DB or something based on CFPropertyLists.
Tradeoffs are that sqlite3 will scale better to large numbers of items
and large items (such as certificates and CRLs), but have a larger
code footprint.  Safari is probably the only client that doesn't
already use sqlite3 though so in the other cases using sqlite3 will
probably make the footprint smaller than having custom code.

An alternative is to keep each type of item in a separate lightweight
DB or property list to help scaling, but if a user stores a lot of web
form passwords for a lot of websites we will still end up reading all
of them into ram rather than just those we need when using sqlite3.

In either case there need to be searchable attributes, and a single
non searchable attribute per item which will be encrypted with a
system wide key know only to a privileged agent.

This agent will need to support 2 simple operations: encrypt blob and
decrypt blob.  The agent can live either in the kernel or in a
lightweight server process that is launched on demand and can exit
when it is no longer needed.  In either case the agent guards the key
bits but freely allows access to it by any client.  This means we have
no keychain ACLs and any application running on the system can decrypt
all keychain secrets.  Mac OS X currently has a much better
architecture which allows unwrapping keys inside the agent and
operating on them by reference without exposing the key bits to the
client.  For private keys and multi use sessions keys this might be
desirable, but adds complexity and code size.

Keychain Synching will require an agent running on the system that
decrypts each item and re-encrypts it the way a Tiger system expects
to see it.  This can be done when the device is connect to a computer,
by requiring the user to enter the synched keychain password on the
device once to obtain the secrets.

Other Security Issues
=====================

* I have not yet looked at SPNEGO and NTLM at all yet.
* We might want to consolidate the Keychain secret mechanism above
  with whatever the device will be using for music DRM services.

Conclusion
==========

If desired I can turn this into a more formal whitepaper and
start trying to set some milestones and timelines.  However for now
I'd like to get some feedback on the current plan.