On 2019-Jul-25, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > Uh, there are no known attacks on AES with known plain-text, e.g., SSL
> > uses AES, so I think we are good with encrypting everything after the
> > first 16 bytes.
>
> Well, maybe there aren't any attacks *now*, but I don't know what will
> happen in the future. I'm not clear what's the intended win by
> encrypting the all-zeroes page hole anyway. If you leave it
> unencrypted, the attacker knows the size of the hole, as well as the
> size of the tuple data area and the size of the LP array. Is that a
> side-channer that leaks much?
This answer https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/31090 is interesting for
three reasons:
1. it says we don't really have to worry about cleartext attacks, at
least not in the immediate future, so encrypting the hole should be OK;
2. it seems to reinforces a point I tried to make earlier, which is that
reusing the IV a small number of times is *not that bad*:
> On the other hand if the Key and IV are reused between messages then
> the same plaintext will lead to the same ciphertext, so you can
> potentially decrypt a message using a sufficiently large corpus of known
> matching plaintext/ciphertext pairs, even without ever recovering the
> key.
Actually the attack being described presumes that you know *both the*
*unencrypted data and the encrypted data* for a certain key/IV pair,
and only then you can decrypt some other data. It doesn't follow that
you can decrypt data just because somebody reused the IV for a second
page ... I haven't seen any literature referenced that explains what
this attack is.
3. It seems clear that AES is sufficiently complicated that explaining
it to non-cryptographers is a lost cause.
--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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