breach

Mitigating BREACH: a “what if”

So, recently there was a task at my work to review enabling gzip compression on our nginx HTTP servers to compress the traffic.

Now, in principle it seemed like a good idea, but having been exposed to the security world a little bit, I was familiar with some of the issues with this, notably, CRIME, BEAST and BREACH.  Of these, only BREACH is unmitigated at the browser end.

The suggested mitigations, in order of effectiveness are:

  1. Disabling HTTP compression
  2. Separating secrets from user input
  3. Randomizing secrets per request
  4. Masking secrets (effectively randomizing by XORing with a random secret per request)
  5. Protecting vulnerable pages with CSRF
  6. Length hiding (by adding random number of bytes to the responses)
  7. Rate-limiting the requests

Now, we’ve effectively being doing (1) by default… but (2), (3) and (4) make me wonder how protocols like OAuth2 are supposed to work.  That got me thinking about a little toy I was given for attending the 2011 linux.conf.au… it’s a YubiKey, one of the early model ones.  The way it operates is that Yubico’s servers, and your key, share a secret AES key (I think it’s AES-128), some static data, and a counter.  Each time you generate a one-time pad with the key, it increments its counter, encrypts the value with the static data, then encodes the output as a hexdump using a keyboard-agnostic encoding scheme to be “typed” into the computer.

Yubico receive this token, decrypt it, then compare the counter value.  If it checks out, and is greater than the existing counter value at their end, they accept it, and store that new counter value.

The same made me wonder if that could work for requests from a browser… that is, you agree on a shared secret over HTTPS, or using Diffie Hellman.  You synchronise counters (either using your new shared secret, or over HTTPS at the same time as you make the shared key), then from there on, each request to your API made by the browser, is then accompanied by a one-time pad, generated by encrypting the counter value and the static data and sending that in the HTTP headers.

There are a few libraries that do AES in the browser, such as JSAES (GPLv3) and aes-js (MIT).

This is going to be expensive to do, so a compromise might be to use this every N requests, where N is small enough that BREACH doesn’t have a sufficient number of requests from which it can derive a secret.  By the time it figures out that secret, the token is expired.  Or they could be bulk-generated at the browser end in the background so there’s a ready supply.

I haven’t gone through the full in’s and out’s of this, and I’m no security expert, but that’s just some initial thinking.