Cybersecurity and Cryptography

I’ve been getting more deeply involved in the cybersecurity and cryptography end of things in the last few weeks.

Did some serious work looking into current best practices for password management. Found that the bcrypt algorithm I had been familiar with has been long ago superseded (no surprise there) and that there is a hash iteration algorithm that can be used to bump up the work involved in computing an off the shelf HMAC to levels where it is suited for use as a password hash (PBKDF2 and here).

I’ve been looking at TLS and related technologies. In the past I’ve tended to treat them as black box components. I’m digging a bit deeper on a few fronts now.

I knew that elliptic curve algorithms were available in the TLS cypher suite but had not realized that they were in active use. Last time I looked at elliptic curve algorithms the community was viewing them with suspicion after the Dual_ED_DRBG fiasco. I think that the reduced computational complexity when processing them may have also lent an air of insecurity to them. At this point it sounds as if they’ve passed muster and are in serious use. I picked up a book (Modern Cryptography and Elliptic Curves, A Beginner’s Guide) to get a better handle on the underlying mathematics and will be taking a closer look on a broader scale.

I’m setting up my raspberry pi controllers (at least a few of them) as TLS/DTLS test endpoints. I’ve loaded and built OpenSSL on them over the weekend and will be coding up some samples to play with in the evenings this week. I’ve got machines ranging from pi-2 to pi-4 so they should provide a nice range of performance for testing.

TLS on TCP

I expect to initially put together some simple TLS over TCP code to make sure I’ve got everything working properly and that my certs are set up correctly.

DTLS on UDP

Once I’ve got TLS working I’ll likely try to transition to point-to-point DTLS as that is also a standardized protocol and a good stepping stone to the proposed multicast adaptation.

Multicast on UDP

I haven’t worked with multicast datagram traffic much (pretty much never) so I’ll likely move on to simple, un-encrypted multicast traffic from there. If I can get some of the machines to join a multicast group and ping traffic off of them, I’ll count that as a win.

Multicast over DTLS on UDP

The final step of this exercise will involve taking the multicast sample and the DTLS sample and attempting to implement the proposed approach to providing multicast support to DTLS. This isn’t a standards track proposal, but seems like the closest thing we’ve got to secure multicast traffic support.

Hoping this comes together. It seems like an interesting exercise. If I can get this work done entirely off hours, I’ll share the resulting code on my github account

Fun with Password Hashing

I’ve been spending some time looking into password hashing best practices over the last week.

I’ve know about the BCrypt algorithm for a long time as the old BSD standard ‘high effort’ hashing algorithm designed to make brute forcing hashes difficult.

I’ve found that there is a new effort called SCrypt intended to generate a modern equivalent for dedicated password hashing as well as a ‘password expansion’ algorithm that appears to be in wide used called PBKFD2.

The PBKDF2 algorithm applies an HMAC using the key input to inject the salt and then to chain iterations of the process. It takes a user selected number of iterations that allows the work-load to generate the hash to be tuned to the scope of expected attacks (and to the performance of the target hardware). This allows modern high performance algorithms such as SHA-256 to be applied in a manner that makes the total calculation of the final salted hash resource intensive enough to reduce the likelihood of a successful brute force attack.

C++ 11, 14, 17 and Later

I’m quite familiar with much of the content of C++ 2011 as it represented a welcome and long desired step up in C++ language capability.

I’m less clear on the changes that live in the 2014 and 2017 incremental updates (smaller and more tightly focused) and the upcoming work that will feed into the next release.

Getting on top of this is becoming more important as I’m back in the C++ world and while almost everything should support C++ 11, the later iterations may be missing or fragmentary.

I’m spending a little time this afternoon looking through resources on this front, starting with the C++ 2011, 2014 and 2017 pages on wikipedia.

I have pulled the draft PDF file for 2011, 2014 and 2017 and grabbed the github source for the standard(s). These are quite useful, but seriously deep waters if only the changes are of specific interest. Interesting pointers on where to buy the official docs here with the 2017 version from ANSI at just over $100.00. The current working draft appears to be on github here. I may take a shot at building that into a readable PDF at some point…

I am also rather interested to see what is in boost these days. Back in the visual studio 2010 era, the TR1 content that eventually fed into C++ 11 was one of the bigger draws…now that is part of the core tools in general so I’m expecting a new range on interesting bits. The seem to have a github repo here.

And here is the C++ 20 page. Interesting that 20 looks to be much more like 11 than 14 and 17 (which were small tweaks).

Just Ordered the newish Josuttis book on C++ 17

Ordered a copy of the new Josuttis book this morning. I’ve found his standard library and templates books to be very much worth reading and I’m hoping that C++17 – The Complete Guide will provide a useful update to Stroustrup (which is getting a bit old).

I’m back in the world of C++ and the language is undergoing a lot more change these days than it had been in the early 2000’s. Keeping up with the future trajectory of C++ is very much on my radar.