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Message Authentication Codes for the Network Time Protocol
draft-aanchal4-ntp-mac-00

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Replaced".
Authors Aanchal Malhotra , Sharon Goldberg
Last updated 2016-07-08
Replaced by draft-ietf-ntp-mac, draft-ietf-ntp-mac, RFC 8573
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draft-aanchal4-ntp-mac-00
Internet Engineering Task Force                              A. Malhotra
Internet-Draft                                               S. Goldberg
Intended status: Standards Track                       Boston University
Expires: January 9, 2017                                    July 8, 2016

       Message Authentication Codes for the Network Time Protocol
                       draft-aanchal4-ntp-mac-00

Abstract

   The Network Time Protocol (NTP) RFC 5905 [RFC5905] uses a message
   authentication code (MAC) to cryptographically authenticate its UDP
   packets.  Currently, NTP packets are authenticated by appending a
   128-bit key to the NTP data, and hashing the result with MD5 to
   obtain a 128-bit tag.  However, as discussed in [BCK] and [RFC6151],
   this not a secure MAC.  As such, this draft considers different
   secure MAC algorithms for use with NTP, and evaluates their
   performance.  Given the security concerns, we also suggest
   deprecating the use of MD5 as defined in [RFC5905] for authenticating
   NTP packets.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on January 9, 2017.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents

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   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  MAC Algorithms  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  Performance Requirements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   4.  Performance Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   5.  Recommendation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   7.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     8.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6

1.  Introduction

   NTP uses a message authentication code (MAC) to authenticate its
   packets.  Currently, NTP packets are authenticated by appending a
   128-bit key to the NTP data, and hashing the result with MD5 to
   obtain a 128-bit tag.  However, as discussed in [BCK] and [RFC6151],
   this not a secure MAC.  As such, this draft considers different
   secure MAC algorithms for use with NTP, and evaluates their
   performance.  Given the security concerns, we also suggest
   deprecating the use of MD5 as defined in [RFC5905] for authenticating
   NTP packets.

1.1.  Requirements Language

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

2.  MAC Algorithms

   We consider five diverse MAC algorithms, which encompass hash-based
   HMAC-MD5 and HMAC-SHA224 [RFC2104], block cipher-based CMAC-AES
   [RFC4493], and universal hashing-based Galois MAC (GMAC) [RFC4543]
   and Poly1305(ChaCha20) as in section 2.6 of [RFC7539].  For
   completeness we also benchmark the legacy MD5(key||message) from
   [RFC5905].

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   +--------------------+--------------+----------------+--------------+
   | Algorithm          |    Input Key |     Output Tag |     Security |
   |                    |       Length | Length (Bytes) | Level (bits) |
   |                    |      (Bytes) |                |              |
   +--------------------+--------------+----------------+--------------+
   | legacy MD5         |           16 |             16 |           NA |
   | HMAC-MD5           |           16 |             16 |           NA |
   | HMAC-SHA224        |           16 |             28 |          112 |
   | CMAC(AES)          |           16 |             16 |          128 |
   | GMAC(AES)          |           16 |             16 |          128 |
   | Poly1305(ChaCha20) |           32 |             16 |          128 |
   +--------------------+--------------+----------------+--------------+

   The choice of algorithms evaluated here is motivated, in part, by
   standardization and availablity of open source implementation.  Four
   out of five algorithms are at least available in the OpenSSL library
   and are standardized.  The Poly1305(ChaCha20) algorithm is
   implemented in LibreSSL, a fork of OpenSSL and also in BoringSSL,
   Google's implementation of OpenSSL.

3.  Performance Requirements

   In order to accurately compute the time, NTP ideally requires MAC
   algorithms to have a constant computational latency.  However, this
   is generally not possible, since latency depends on the CPU load,
   temperature, and other uncontrollable factors.  Instead, a MAC
   algorithm that requires fewer clock cycles for computation is
   prefered over one that requires more clock cycles, as this directly
   translates to a reduction in jitter (i.e., the variance of the
   latency for computing the MAC).

   Throughput is another important consideration.  NTP servers may have
   to deal with thousands of client requests per second.  A study [NIST]
   on the usage analysis of NIST's NTP stratum 1 servers shows these
   servers caters to 28,000 requests/second on an average, per server.

   Most of the Internet is served by stratum 2 and stratum 3 servers,
   some of which are part of voluntary NTP pool.  These machines may be
   running old hardware.  So we benchmark performance on a range of
   software and hardware platforms.

4.  Performance Results

   The NTP header is 48 bytes long.  We therefore consider the latency
   and throughput for several secure message authentication code (MAC)
   algorithms when computed over 48-byte messages.

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   We customize the in-built speed utility of OpenSSL-1.0.2g (03 May
   2016) version to compute the latency and throughput for each MAC as
   shown in the tables below.  OpenSSL, however, does not implement
   stream-cipher ChaCha20-based Poly1305 MAC algorithm.  To speed test
   this MAC, we use LibreSSL 2.3.1, a fork of OpenSSL implementation.
   OpenSSL and LibreSSL are the most widely used cryptographic libraries
   and are used by the current NTP implementations.

   Since the introduction of New Instruction (NI) set for hardware
   support in Intel chips, certain MACs like CMAC and GMAC have
   performance advantage on such machines.  Based on this, we perform
   two different benchmarks once with AES-NI enabled and the other time
   disabled on an x86_64, Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz with
   one core CPU.

   This table shows throughput in terms of number of 48-byte NTP payload
   processed per second.

          +--------------------+-------------+-----------------+
          | Algorithm          | with AES-NI |  without AES-NI |
          +--------------------+-------------+-----------------+
          | legacy MD5         |       3118K |           3165K |
          | HMAC-MD5           |       2742K |           2749K |
          | HMAC-SHA224        |       1265K |           1267K |
          | CMAC(AES)          |       7567K |           4388K |
          | GMAC(AES)          |      16612K |           4627K |
          | Poly1305(ChaCha20) |       2598K |           2398K |
          +--------------------+-------------+-----------------+

   This table shows latency in terms of number of CPU cycles per byte
   (cpb) when processing a 48-byte NTP payload.

          +--------------------+-------------+-----------------+
          | Algorithm          | with AES-NI |  without AES-NI |
          +--------------------+-------------+-----------------+
          | legacy MD5         |       16.03 |            15.7 |
          | HMAC-MD5           |        18.2 |            18.1 |
          | HMAC-SHA224        |        39.4 |              39 |
          | CMAC(AES)          |         6.6 |            11.3 |
          | GMAC(AES)          |       3.009 |            10.8 |
          | Poly1305(ChaCha20) |        14.4 |              15 |
          +--------------------+-------------+-----------------+

   TODO: Test on other types of hardware.

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5.  Recommendation

   We suggest that use of GMAC(AES) because it has the best latency and
   throughput performance.

6.  Security Considerations

   The MD5 (key||message) "message authentication code" specified in
   [RFC5905] is vulnerable to length extension attacks, and uses the
   insecure MD5 hash function, and therefore should be deprecated.

   The output of HMAC-SHA224 is 28 bytes, but we truncate it to 16 bytes
   as in section 4 of [RFC7630] to fit into the NTP packet.  As noted in
   section 6 of [RFC2104] it is safe to truncate the output of MACs as
   long as the truncated length is greater than 80-bits and not less
   than half the length of the hash output.

   TO DO: Not finished yet.  Following factors will be considered for
   security comparison.

   1.  Output length of tag.

   2.  Input Key length.

   3.  Strength of the underlying cryptographic hash function or cipher.

   4.  Size and number of messages MACd using the same key.

7.  Acknowledgements

   The authors wish to acknowledge useful discussions with Harlan Stenn,
   Mayank Varia, Daniel Franke, Ethan Heilman, and Leen Alshenibr.

8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2104]  Krawczyk, H., Bellare, M., and R. Canetti, "HMAC: Keyed-
              Hashing for Message Authentication", RFC 2104,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2104, February 1997,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2104>.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

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   [RFC4493]  Song, JH., Poovendran, R., Lee, J., and T. Iwata, "The
              AES-CMAC Algorithm", RFC 4493, DOI 10.17487/RFC4493, June
              2006, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4493>.

   [RFC4543]  McGrew, D. and J. Viega, "The Use of Galois Message
              Authentication Code (GMAC) in IPsec ESP and AH", RFC 4543,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC4543, May 2006,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4543>.

   [RFC5905]  Mills, D., Martin, J., Ed., Burbank, J., and W. Kasch,
              "Network Time Protocol Version 4: Protocol and Algorithms
              Specification", RFC 5905, DOI 10.17487/RFC5905, June 2010,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5905>.

   [RFC6151]  Turner, S. and L. Chen, "Updated Security Considerations
              for the MD5 Message-Digest and the HMAC-MD5 Algorithms",
              RFC 6151, DOI 10.17487/RFC6151, March 2011,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6151>.

   [RFC7539]  Nir, Y. and A. Langley, "ChaCha20 and Poly1305 for IETF
              Protocols", RFC 7539, DOI 10.17487/RFC7539, May 2015,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7539>.

   [RFC7630]  Merkle, J., Ed. and M. Lochter, "HMAC-SHA-2 Authentication
              Protocols in the User-based Security Model (USM) for
              SNMPv3", RFC 7630, DOI 10.17487/RFC7630, October 2015,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7630>.

8.2.  Informative References

   [BCK]      Bellare, M., Canetti, R., and H. Krawczyk, "Keyed Hash
              Functions and Message Authentication", in Proceedings of
              Crypto'96, 1996.

   [NIST]     Sherman, J. and J. Levine, "Usage Analysis of the NIST
              Internet Time Service", in Journal of Research of the
              National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2016.

Authors' Addresses

   Aanchal Malhotra
   Boston University
   111 Cummington St
   Boston, MA  02215
   US

   Email: aanchal4@bu.edu

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   Sharon Goldberg
   Boston University
   111 Cummington St
   Boston, MA  02215
   US

   Email: goldbe@cs.bu.edu

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