Re: storing an explicit nonce

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 1:07 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> But won't we then end up with a different set of requirements around
> nonce assignment durability when introducing GCM support? That's not
> actually entirely trivial to do correctly on a standby. I guess we can
> use AES-GCM-SSIV and be ok with living with edge cases leading to nonce
> reuse, but ...

All these different encryption modes are hard for me to grok.

That said, I want to mention a point which I think may be relevant
here. As far as I know, in the case of a permanent table page, we
never write X then X' then X again. If the change is WAL-logged, then
the LSN advances, and it will never thereafter go backward. Otherwise,
it's something that uses MarkBufferDirtyHint(). As far as I know, all
of those changes are one-way. For example, we set hint bits without
logging the change, but anything that clears hint bits is logged. We
mark btree index items dead as a type of hint, but they never come
back to life again; instead, they get cleaned out of the page entirely
as a WAL-logged operation. So I don't know that an adversary seeing
the same exact ciphertext multiple times is really likely to occur.

Well, it could certainly occur for temporary or unlogged tables, since
those have LSN = 0. And in cases were we currently copy pages around,
like creating a new database, it could happen. I suspect those cases
could be fixed, if we cared enough, and there are independent reasons
to want to fix the create-new-database case. It would be fairly easy
to put fake LSNs in temporary buffers, since they're in a separate
pool of buffers in backend-private memory with a separate buffer
manager. And it could probably even be done for unlogged tables,
though not as easily. Or we could use the special-space technique to
put some unpredictable garbage into each page and then change the
garbage every time we write the page. I read the discussion so far to
say that maybe these kinds of measures aren't even needed, and if so,
great. But even without doing anything, I don't think it's going to
happen very much.

Another case where this sort of thing might happen is a standby doing
whatever the master did. I suppose that could be avoided if the
standby always has its own encryption keys, but that forces a key
rotation when you create a standby, and it doesn't seem like a lot of
fun to insist on that. But the information leak seems minor. If we get
to a point where an adversary with full filesystem access on all our
systems can't do better than assessing our replication lag, we'll be a
lot better off then than we are now.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com