Session Ticket Rotation

kyprizel kyprizel at gmail.com
Mon Sep 22 12:23:52 UTC 2014


What about sharing keys b/w the physical instances?

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Richard Fussenegger, BSc <
richard at fussenegger.info> wrote:

> I'd like to implement built-in session ticket rotation. I know that it
> this was discussed before but it was never implemented. Right now a custom
> external ticket key system is supported. Admins with single installations
> and not enough knowledge about the topic are left with keys that are valid
> for the complete lifetime nginx is running.
>
> I thought about a rotation scheme that introduces a single new
> configuration variable (e.g. ssl_session_ticket_key_rotation or
> ssl_session_ticket_key_interval) that defines the interval in which the
> ticket key should be rotated. I think a default setting of 24 hours would
> be enough for most installations. One key is always used for decryption and
> encryption and the most recently expired key is only used for decryption.
> This means that we have a de- and encrypt key for 24 hours and a decrypt
> key for 48 hours with the default setting. The best place for this would be
> in ngx_event_openssl.c#2640 after the if (paths == NULL) by checking if the
> aforementioned variable is set (default) and if the currently used key has
> expired. If it hasn't return NGX_OK (as it is now) otherwise copy current
> key to old key and generate new key.
>
> Unsolved questions:
>
> Implementation: Currently OpenSSL is generating and keeping track of the
> key (this would still be the case if the newly introduced setting is set to
> "0"). We'd have to introduce two variables - one for the current and one
> for the old key plus timestamps - and let OpenSSL know about the key before
> attempting to decrypt sent session data.
>
> Per server keys: CVE-2014-3616 from Antoine Delignat-Lavaud was dealing
> with this. I have to review his patches but I guess that the variables have
> to be arrays and we'd have to keep different current and old keys per
> server. But what if one wants to share the sessions among servers? I guess
> this has to depend on the location the configuration was set. As I said, I
> have to review his patches to gather more knowledge for this problem.
>
> Restarts: Apache is storing the key to file, that would allow the process
> to read the last used keys. But of course this isn't very secure and we may
> need an additional setting to define the path where these intermediate keys
> should be stored. Of course we could also simply ignore restarts, as it is
> now. But we'd loose the ability to decrypt old sessions tickets.
>
> Any thoughts from your side are highly appreciated.
>
> Richard
>
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