oss-security - Re: CVE request: crypt_blowfish 8-bit character mishandling

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Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2011 01:33:18 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: Michael Matz <matz@...e.de>
Cc: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com, Ludwig Nussel <ludwig.nussel@...e.de>,
	Thorsten Kukuk <kukuk@...e.de>, Andreas Jaeger <aj@...e.de>
Subject: Re: CVE request: crypt_blowfish 8-bit character mishandling

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 02:05:35PM +0200, Michael Matz wrote:
> If so, treating passwords containing 0xff special seems sensible.

I implemented this in a certain smart way.  Hopefully, not too smart.
I used bitwise ops.  No branches, no variable count bit shifts, no table
lookups using password data.  Also, not all passwords with 0xff chars
are affected by the change - only those that would produce collisions
with buggy hashes of multiple passwords.

There's still a minor timing leak of password length, but it is not
related to the sign extension bug aftermath - it was there before.
Also, it is difficult to deal with, especially considering that the
callers use C strings anyway, with things such as strlen() on them.
(On a related note, with SHA-crypt things are worse in this respect.)

I gave some thought to what action to take on a would-be collision.
Simply failing the password hashing operation didn't sound great - it'd
be prone to side-channel leaks of this property of the attempted
password, and users wouldn't be able to set those weird passwords if the
system happens to use $2a$ instead of the now more correct $2y$ for new
hashes.  This would in turn reveal properties of system setup to a
non-root user.  So I chose to alter the hashing method in those cases
such that the collision is avoided and no other collision may be easily
found (without breaking Blowfish).  There appeared to be two primary
ways to do it: by altering the key expansion or by altering something
else.  Speaking of the former, one way to do it would be to produce a
sequence of bytes in the expanded key that wouldn't otherwise be
possible.  One such sequence is two NUL bytes in a row.  This would be
great, except that there's no room to make use of this trick for
passwords of length 71 and 72.  Excluding those two lengths from
protection wasn't nice, and treating them specially wasn't nice either.
So I opted to alter something else, but not too far away from key setup.
Specifically, I alter the initial expanded key, but not the expanded key
used further in bcrypt.  Such discrepancy between the two expanded keys
could not be achieved before.

Here's my current code, with lots of comments - more comments than code,
actually, because the code is very compact:

http://cvsweb.openwall.com/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/Owl/packages/glibc/crypt_blowfish/crypt_blowfish.c.diff?r1=1.19;r2=1.20

and here's the entire thing (temporary URL, not released, not for actual use):

http://www.openwall.com/tmp/crypt_blowfish-1.1.1.tar.gz

(the release will probably be 1.2).

Please help me review and test this.

For testing, here's my buggy to correct input password converter,
implemented as John the Ripper external filter.  Put it in john.conf,
invoke as -e=bcrypt_x2a along with any other mode, maybe even along with
--stdin and --stdout at once for manual testing (that's what I did).

http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-dev/2011/07/06/15

Thanks,

Alexander

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