On Sat, Jul 27, 2019 at 1:32 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> Uh, I listed the three options for the CRC and gave the benefits of
> each:
>
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20190725200343.xo4dcjm5azrfn6zr@momjian.us
>
> Obviously I was not clear on the benefits. To quote:
>
> 1. compute CRC and then encrypt everything
> 3. encrypt and then CRC, and store the CRC encrypted
>
> Numbers 1 & 3 give us tampering detection, though with the CRC being so
> small, it isn't totally secure.
>
> > Are you worried about an attacker forging the page checksum by
> > installing another encrypted page that gives the same checksum? I'm not
> > sure how that attack works ... I mean why can the attacker install
> > arbitrary pages?
>
> Well, with #2
>
> 2 encrypt and then CRC, and store the CRC unchanged
>
> you can modify the page, even small parts, and just replace the CRC to
> match your changes. In #1 and #3, you would get a CRC error in almost
> all cases since you have no way of setting the decrypted CRC without
> knowing the key. You can change the encrypted CRC, but the odds that
> the decrypted one would match the page is very slim.
Regarding #1 and #3, with CTR mode you do not need to know the key to
make changes to the CRC. Flipping bits of the encrypted CRC would flip
the same bits of the decrypted one. This was one of the issues with
the older WiFi encryption standard WEP[1] which used RC4 + CRC32. It's
not the exact same usage pattern, but I wouldn't be surprised if there
is a way to make in place updates and matching CRC32 changes even if
it's encrypted.
Given the non-cryptographic nature of CRC and its 16-bit size, I'd
round down the malicious tamper detection it provides to zero. At best
it catches random disk errors so might as well keep it in plain text
and checkable offline.
More generally, without a cryptographic MAC I don't think it's
possible to provide any meaningful malicious tamper detection. And
even that would have to be off-page to deal with page replay (which I
think is out of scope).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRC-32#Data_integrity
Regards,
-- Sehrope Sarkuni
Founder & CEO | JackDB, Inc. | https://www.jackdb.com/
