Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 26 Aug 2004 18:08:11 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au>
To:        Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net>
Cc:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Report of collision-generation with MD5
Message-ID:  <20040826080811.GQ423@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <20040825201640.GB25259@odin.ac.hmc.edu>
References:  <6.1.2.0.0.20040818141732.04a6e060@64.7.153.2> <XFMail.20040825215150.guy@device.dyndns.org> <20040825201640.GB25259@odin.ac.hmc.edu>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, 2004-Aug-25 13:16:40 -0700, Brooks Davis wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 09:51:50PM +0200, guy@device.dyndns.org wrote:
>> I _believe_ answer is "no", because i _think_ the FreeBSD ports system also
>> verify the size of the archive(s) (cat /usr/ports/any/any/distinfo to see
>> what made me think that).

I don't believe the size adds much security.

>Paranoia might suggest adding support for multiple hashes which would
>vastly increase the difficulty of finding a collision

I'd agree with this.  Identifying suitable hashes is a more difficult task.

>Hmm, one thing to think about might be making sure the various archive
>formats are hard to pad with junk.  I think the stream based ones need
>to allow zero pading at the end to support tapes, but it would be
>intresting to see if other junk can end up in pading sections without
>the archiver noticing.  If so, that would be a good thing to find a way
>to detect.

tar uses one (or two) blocks of NULs to mark logical EOF - anything
beyond that is ignored.  gzip ignores (but warns) about padding after
its expected EOF.  I'm not sure about bzip2.  I suspect it would be
possibly to include arbitrary padding inside a ZIP file, though
probably not at the end.  This would make it relatively easy to pad a
trojan'd file to any desired size.

-- 
Peter Jeremy



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20040826080811.GQ423>