I posted this a while back and it gathered a little discussion:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-agl-tcpm-sadata-00.txt
(implementation in [1])

I would like to have this published as Experimental and to get an
option number assigned.

The spec itself includes a somewhat rambling justification because I
wanted to decouple the spec, which is more general, from the exact
reason that I wish to start testing this over the Internet at large.
However, in order to provoke discussion I think I should explain my
motivation:

This spec allows for opportunistic encryption of TCP connections with
no additional round trips. Details of the project can be found at [2],
however a quick summary follows:

Although SYN/ACK payloads could be used to accelerate many protocols,
I'm proposing that, for HTTP, the SYN/ACK payload contains an 8-byte
random nonce and a 32-byte eliptic-curve public value. The client can
then perform key agreement and send it's own public value, nonce and
any encrypted payload in the final ACK. (Or in a following packet,
that works fine too). Data is then encrypted using Salsa20/8 where the
key is SHA256(diffie-hellman output + server nonce + client nonce) and
the IVs are 0 and 2**63 for client->server and server->client, resp.

Obviously, this open to both a downgrade and man-in-the-middle attack.
For a specific user, it offers little real security. However,
amortised over a large set of users, any ISPs performing these attacks
on a large scale will be detected. (I plan on building a network of
hosts probing for large scale attacks.) Thus, eavesdroppers are
removed from the equation and, against the rest, it can protect most
of the people, most of the time.

I also plan to sign the resulting packets with TCP-AO at some point,
if possible. However, given that that is still under development I'm
going to make that part of the negotiation, above, so that it can be
deployed without it for now.

Obviously, this system can only prove itself in time. However, it
can't prove itself with an option number assigned. And thus, I'm
looking for a consensus that this is an interesting experiment.

Thanks

Having spoken to quite a few people about this, I now have an FAQ on
the design which is included below:

* Why Elliptic-curves?

The payload must be short otherwise SYN-floods could use this as an
amplification
to backscatter DDoS another host.

Also, the reduced computation cost (as compared to Diffie-Hellman over a
multiplicative finite field) is very nice.

* Why 25519?

It's very fast (2000 ops/sec with my C code. 4000 ops/sec with asm). Also, the
server's public value must be constant, otherwise an attacker could eat CPU
time with a SYN flood and curve25519 is designed for that.

Since this is constant for all connections, there is no perfect forward
secrecy.

* Can't you fit the client's public value in the SYN?

A SYN generally has 20 bytes of free option space these days. (We can't use the
payload space in a SYN). Since this can't be the last option ever, we need to
leave 4 bytes spare. 2 bytes for the option header means 14 bytes for the
public value. The closest prime is 2**112-75.

I'm a bear of little brain and picking my own curve is already a hell of a
task, but assuming that I can:

The best, general algorithm currently known for breaking the DH problem on
elliptic curves is Pollard's Rho. The work involved in this attack is sqrt(n),
which is 2**56 in this case. Critically, once you have solved a single instance
you can precompute tables to speed up breaking more instances. With a petabyte
of storage, you could break 112-bit curves in 2**12 operations, which is very
fast.

* Can't you use a smaller field anyway?

Some speedup could be gained by using an EC with a field size around 200 bits.
However the effort of defining such a curve is pretty huge. The standard NIST
curves around that size are slower:

http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2003/corr2003-18.pdf (table 6)

* Why Salsa20/8?

It encrypts at two cycles per byte on modern CPUs[1]. The best attack on this,
reduced round, variant is 2**251. It's very unlikely that an attack would ever
break it to the point that it's easier than performing a downgrade attack.

http://cr.yp.to/streamciphers/phase3speed-20080331.pdf



[1] http://code.google.com/p/obstcp/source/browse/trunk/patches/synack-payload
[2] http://code.google.com/p/obstcp/

-- 
Adam Langley agl@imperialviolet.org http://www.imperialviolet.org
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