Packet Timing and Data Leaks

[Chris Rapier]

As an aside, I talked to the lead author on that acoustic side channel 
attack. He says "This is a very interesting parallel to our paper and I 
am happy to tell you that the timing between keystrokes was not used as 
part of our model. The only features extracted for our classifier were 
the acoustic emanations of the individual keystrokes, so no TDoA or 
inter-key timing was used."

Hopefully, I haven't give him and his team ideas for a new attack :)

Mitch and I will take a look at your pull if you like. It may take a bit 
as we are finishing up some work on ChaCha20.

Chris

On 8/11/23 8:38 PM, Damien Miller wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Aug 2023, Damien Miller wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 7 Aug 2023, Chris Rapier wrote:
>>
>>>> The broader issue of hiding all potential keystroke timing is not yet fixed.
>>>
>>> Could some level of obfuscation come from enabling Nagle for interactive
>>> sessions that has an associated TTY? Though that would be of limited
>>> usefulness in low RTT environments. I don't like the idea of having a steady
>>> drip of packets as that seems problematic both in terms of code complexity and
>>> network usage. I also don't like the idea of imposing random jitter though
>>> that might be easier to implement. However, without actual modeling I have no
>>> idea if that would actually improve things.
>>
>> Nagle is usually turned off because it causes annoying perceptions of
>> non-deterministic latency.
>>
>> For ssh, IMO sending interactive traffic on a fixed clock (e.g. every
>> 2-4ms) instead of as soon as possible, and adding fake keystroke packets
>> for some interval after the user stops generating traffic is the way to
>> fix it. I've slowly been preparing for this by reworking the mainloop and
>> associated timers.
> 
> Here's the beginning of an implementation of this. Far from complete,
> but the timing quantisation part seems to work at least.
> 
> https://github.com/djmdjm/openssh-wip/pull/24
> 
> -d