Paul Zimmermann

Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice

We investigate the security of Diffie-Hellman key exchange as used in popular Internet protocols and find it to be less secure than widely believed. First, we present Logjam, a novel flaw in TLS that lets a man-in-the-middle downgrade connections to export-grade Diffie-Hellman. To carry out this attack, we implement the number field sieve discrete log algorithm. After a week-long precomputation for a specified 512-bit group, we can compute arbitrary discrete logs in that group in about a minute. We find that 82% of vulnerable servers use a single 512-bit group, allowing us to compromise connections to 7% of Alexa Top Million HTTPS sites. In response, major browsers are being changed to reject short groups. We go on to consider Diffie-Hellman with 768- and 1024-bit groups. We estimate that even in the 1024-bit case, the computations are plausible given nation-state resources. A small number of fixed or standardized groups are used by millions of servers; performing precomputation for a single 1024-bit group would allow passive eavesdropping on 18% of popular HTTPS sites, and a second group would allow decryption of traffic to 66% of IPsec VPNs and 26% of SSH servers. A close reading of published NSA leaks shows that the agencys attacks on VPNs are consistent with having achieved such a break. We conclude that moving to stronger key exchange methods should be a priority for the Internet community.

Discrete Logarithm in GF2809 with FFS

The year 2013 has seen several major complexity advances for the discrete logarithm problem in multiplicative groups of small- characteristic finite fields. These outmatch, asymptotically, the Function Field Sieve FFS approach, which was so far the most efficient algorithm known for this task. Yet, on the practical side, it is not clear whether the new algorithms are uniformly better than FFS. This article presents the state of the art with regard to the FFS algorithm, and reports data from a record-sized discrete logarithm computation in a prime-degree extension field.

Finding optimal formulae for bilinear maps

We describe a unified framework to search for optimal formulae evaluating bilinear or quadratic maps. This framework applies to polynomial multiplication and squaring, finite field arithmetic, matrix multiplication, etc. We then propose a new algorithm to solve problems in this unified framework. With an implementation of this algorithm, we prove the optimality of various published upper bounds, and find improved upper bounds.