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Thanks to Mark Wooding for explaining the method of doing this. At
first glance it seemed _obviously_ impossible to run an algorithm that
needs an iteration per factor of 2 in p-1, without a timing leak
giving away the number of factors of 2 in p-1. But it's not, because
you can do the M-R checks interleaved with each step of your whole
modular exponentiation, and they're cheap enough that you can do them
in _every_ step, even the ones where the exponent is too small for M-R
to be interested in yet, and then do bitwise masking to exclude the
spurious results from the final output.
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I'm about to rewrite the Miller-Rabin testing code, so let's start by
introducing a test suite that the old version passes, and then I can
make sure the new one does too.
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This code base has always been a bit confused about which spelling it
likes to use to refer to that signature algorithm. The SSH protocol id
is "ssh-dss". But everyone I know refers to it as the Digital
Signature _Algorithm_, not the Digital Signature _Standard_.
When I moved everything down into the crypto subdir, I took the
opportunity to rename sshdss.c to dsa.c. Now I'm doing the rest of the
job: all internal identifiers and code comments refer to DSA, and the
spelling "dss" only survives in externally visible identifiers that
have to remain constant.
(Such identifiers include the SSH protocol id, and also the string id
used to identify the key type in PuTTY's own host key cache. We can't
change the latter without causing everyone a backwards-compatibility
headache, and if we _did_ ever decide to do that, we'd surely want to
do a much more thorough job of making the cache format more sensible!)
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A 'strong' prime, as defined by the Handbook of Applied Cryptography,
is a prime p such that each of p-1 and p+1 has a large prime factor,
and that the large factor q of p-1 is such that q-1 in turn _also_ has
a large prime factor.
HoAC says that making your RSA key using primes of this form defeats
some factoring algorithms - but there are other faster algorithms to
which it makes no difference. So this is probably not a useful
precaution in practice. However, it has been recommended in the past
by some official standards, and it's easy to implement given the new
general facility in PrimeCandidateSource that lets you ask for your
prime to satisfy an arbitrary modular congruence. (And HoAC also says
there's no particular reason _not_ to use strong primes.) So I provide
it as an option, just in case anyone wants to select it.
The change to the key generation algorithm is entirely in sshrsag.c,
and is neatly independent of the prime-generation system in use. If
you're using Maurer provable prime generation, then the known factor q
of p-1 can be used to help certify p, and the one for q-1 to help with
q in turn; if you switch to probabilistic prime generation then you
still get an RSA key with the right structure, except that every time
the definition says 'prime factor' you just append '(probably)'.
(The probabilistic version of this procedure is described as 'Gordon's
algorithm' in HoAC section 4.4.2.)
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If you want to generate a Sophie Germain / safe prime pair with this
code, then after you've made p, you need to test the primality of
2p+1.
The easiest way to do that is to make a PrimeCandidateSource that is
so constrained as to only be able to deliver 2p+1 as a candidate, and
then run the ordinary prime generation system. The problem is that the
prime generation loops forever, so if 2p+1 _isn't_ prime, it will just
keep testing the same number over and over again and failing the test.
To solve this, I add a 'one-shot mode' to the PrimeCandidateSource
itself, which will cause it to return NULL if asked to generate a
second candidate. Then the prime-generation loops all detect that and
return NULL in turn. However, for clients that _don't_ set a pcs into
one-shot mode, the API remains unchanged: pcs_generate will not return
until it's found a prime (by its own criteria).
This feels like a bit of a bodge, API-wise. But the other two obvious
approaches turn out more awkward.
One option is to extract the Pockle from the PrimeGenerationContext
and use that to directly test primality of 2p+1 based on p - but that
way you don't get to _probabilistically_ generate safe primes, because
that kind of PGC has no Pockle in the first place. (And you can't make
one separately, because you can't convince it that an only
probabilistically generated p is prime!)
Another option is to add a test() method to PrimeGenerationPolicy,
that sits alongside generate(). Then, having generated p, you just
_test_ 2p+1. But then in the provable case you have to explain to it
that it should use p as part of the proof, so that API would get
awkward in its own way.
So this is actually the least disruptive way to do it!
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A Sophie Germain prime is a prime p such that 2p+1 is also prime. The
larger prime of the pair 2p+1 is also known as a 'safe prime', and is
the preferred kind of modulus for conventional Diffie-Hellman.
Generating these is harder work than normal prime generation. There's
not really much of a technique except to just keep generating
candidate primes p and then testing 2p+1. But what you _can_ do to
speed things up is to get the prime-candidate generator to help a bit:
it's already enforcing that no small prime divides p, and it's easy to
get it to also enforce that no small prime divides 2p+1. That check
can filter out a lot of bad candidates early, before you waste time on
the more expensive checks, so you have a better chance of success with
each number that gets as far as Miller-Rabin.
Here I add an extra setup function for PrimeCandidateSource which
enables those extra checks. After you call pcs_try_sophie_germain(),
the PCS will only deliver you numbers for which both p and 2p+1 are
free of small factors.
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Conveniently checkable certificates of primality aren't a new concept.
I didn't invent them, and I wasn't the first to implement them. Given
that, I thought it might be useful to be able to independently verify
a prime generated by PuTTY's provable prime system. Then, even if you
don't trust _this_ code, you might still trust someone else's
verifier, or at least be less willing to believe that both were
colluding.
The Perl module Math::Prime::Util is the only free software I've found
that defines a specific text-file format for certificates of
primality. The MPU format (as it calls it) supports various different
methods of certifying the primality of a number (most of which, like
Pockle's, depend on having previously proved some smaller number(s) to
be prime). The system implemented by Pockle is on its list: MPU calls
it by the name "BLS5".
So this commit introduces extra stored data inside Pockle so that it
remembers not just _that_ it believes certain numbers to be prime, but
also _why_ it believed each one to be prime. Then there's an extra
method in the Pockle API to translate its internal data structures
into the text of an MPU certificate for any number it knows about.
Math::Prime::Util doesn't come with a command-line verification tool,
unfortunately; only a Perl function which you feed a string argument.
So also in this commit I add test/mpu-check.pl, which is a trivial
command-line client of that function.
At the moment, this new piece of API is only exposed via testcrypt. I
could easily put some user interface into the key generation tools
that would save a few primality certificates alongside the private
key, but I have yet to think of any good reason to do it. Mostly this
facility is intended for debugging and cross-checking of the
_algorithm_, not of any particular prime.
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This uses all the facilities I've been adding in previous commits. It
implements Maurer's algorithm for generating a prime together with a
Pocklington certificate of its primality, by means of recursing to
generate smaller primes to be factors of p-1 for the Pocklington
check, then doing a test Miller-Rabin iteration to quickly exclude
obvious composites, and then doing the full Pocklington check.
In my case, this means I add each prime I generate to a Pockle. So the
algorithm says: recursively generate some primes and add them to the
PrimeCandidateSource, then repeatedly get a candidate value back from
the pcs, check it with M-R, and feed it to the Pockle. If the Pockle
accepts it, then we're done (and the Pockle will then know that value
is prime when our recursive caller uses it in turn, if we have one).
A small refinement to that algorithm is that I iterate M-R until the
witness value I tried is such that it at least _might_ be a primitive
root - which is to say that M-R didn't get 1 by evaluating any power
of it smaller than n-1. That way, there's less chance of the Pockle
rejecting the witness value. And sooner or later M-R must _either_
tell me I've got a potential primitive-root witness _or_ tell me it's
shown the number to be composite.
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The old system I removed in commit 79d3c1783b had both linear and
exponential phase types, but the new one only had exponential, because
at that point I'd just thrown away all the clients of the linear phase
type. But I'm going to add another one shortly, so I have to put it
back in.
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pcs_get_upper_bound lets the holder of a PrimeCandidateSource ask what
is the largest value it might ever generate. pcs_get_bits_remaining
lets it ask how much extra entropy it's going to generate on top of
the requirements that have already been input into it.
Both of these will be needed by the upcoming provable-prime work to
decide what sizes of subsidiary prime to generate.
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We already had a function pcs_require_residue_1() which lets you ask
PrimeCandidateSource to ensure it only returns numbers congruent to 1
mod a given value. pcs_require_residue_1_mod_prime() is the same, but
it also records the number in a list of prime factors of n-1, which
can be queried later.
The idea is that if you're generating a DSA key, in which the small
prime q must divide p-1, the upcoming provable generation algorithm
will be able to recover q from the PrimeCandidateSource and use it as
part of the primality certificate, which reduces the number of bits of
extra prime factors it also has to make up.
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This implements an extended form of primality verification using
certificates based on Pocklington's theorem. You make a Pockle object,
and then try to convince it that one number after another is prime, by
means of providing it with a list of prime factors of p-1 and a
primitive root. (Or just by saying 'this prime is small enough for you
to check yourself'.)
Pocklington's theorem requires you to have factors of p-1 whose
product is at least the square root of p. I've extended that to
support factorisations only as big as the cube root, via an extension
of the theorem given in Maurer's paper on generating provable primes.
The Pockle object is more or less write-only: it has no methods for
reading out its contents. Its only output channel is the return value
when you try to insert a prime into it: if it isn't sufficiently
convinced that your prime is prime, it will return an error code. So
anything for which it returns POCKLE_OK you can be confident of.
I'm going to use this for provable prime generation. But exposing this
part of the system as an object in its own right means I can write a
set of unit tests for this specifically. My negative tests exercise
all the different ways a certification can be erroneous or inadequate;
the positive tests include proofs of primality of various primes used
in elliptic-curve crypto. The Poly1305 proof in particular is taken
from a proof in DJB's paper, which has exactly the form of a
Pocklington certificate only written in English.
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The functions primegen() and primegen_add_progress_phase() are gone.
In their place is a small vtable system with two methods corresponding
to them, plus the usual admin of allocating and freeing contexts.
This API change is the starting point for being able to drop in
different prime generation algorithms at run time in response to user
configuration.
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This further cleans up the prime-generation code, to the point where
the main primegen() function has almost nothing in it. Also now I'll
be able to reuse M-R as a primitive in more sophisticated alternatives
to primegen().
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The old API was one of those horrible things I used to do when I was
young and foolish, in which you have just one function, and indicate
which of lots of things it's doing by passing in flags. It was crying
out to be replaced with a vtable.
While I'm at it, I've reworked the code on the Windows side that
decides what to do with the progress bar, so that it's based on
actually justifiable estimates of probability rather than magic
integer constants.
Since computers are generally faster now than they were at the start
of this project, I've also decided there's no longer any point in
making the fixed final part of RSA key generation bother to report
progress at all. So the progress bars are now only for the variable
part, i.e. the actual prime generations.
(This is a reapplication of commit a7bdefb39, without the Miller-Rabin
refactoring accidentally folded into it. Also this time I've added -lm
to the link options, which for some reason _didn't_ cause me a link
failure last time round. No idea why not.)
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This reverts commit a7bdefb3942fec5fca41bfa46d77d70b1d6e4fd2.
I had accidentally mashed it together with another commit. I did
actually want to push both of them, but I'd rather push them
separately! So I'm backing out the combined blob, and I'll re-push
them with their proper comments and explanations.
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The old API was one of those horrible things I used to do when I was
young and foolish, in which you have just one function, and indicate
which of lots of things it's doing by passing in flags. It was crying
out to be replaced with a vtable.
While I'm at it, I've reworked the code on the Windows side that
decides what to do with the progress bar, so that it's based on
actually justifiable estimates of probability rather than magic
integer constants.
Since computers are generally faster now than they were at the start
of this project, I've also decided there's no longer any point in
making the fixed final part of RSA key generation bother to report
progress at all. So the progress bars are now only for the variable
part, i.e. the actual prime generations.
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The more features and options I add to PrimeCandidateSource, the more
cumbersome it will be to replicate each one in a command-line option
to the ultimate primegen() function. So I'm moving to an API in which
the client of primegen() constructs a PrimeCandidateSource themself,
and passes it in to primegen().
Also, changed the API for pcs_new() so that you don't have to pass
'firstbits' unless you really want to. The net effect is that even
though we've added flexibility, we've also simplified the call sites
of primegen() in the simple case: if you want a 1234-bit prime, you
just need to pass pcs_new(1234) as the argument to primegen, and
you're done.
The new declaration of primegen() lives in ssh_keygen.h, along with
all the types it depends on. So I've had to #include that header in a
few new files.
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I've replaced the random number generation and small delta-finding
loop in primegen() with a much more elaborate system in its own source
file, with unit tests and everything.
Immediate benefits:
- fixes a theoretical possibility of overflowing the target number of
bits, if the random number was so close to the top of the range
that the addition of delta * factor pushed it over. However, this
only happened with negligible probability.
- fixes a directional bias in delta-finding. The previous code
incremented the number repeatedly until it found a value coprime to
all the right things, which meant that a prime preceded by a
particularly long sequence of numbers with tiny factors was more
likely to be chosen. Now we select candidate delta values at
random, that bias should be eliminated.
- changes the semantics of the outermost primegen() function to make
them easier to use, because now the caller specifies the 'bits' and
'firstbits' values for the actual returned prime, rather than
having to account for the factor you're multiplying it by in DSA.
DSA client code is correspondingly adjusted.
Future benefits:
- having the candidate generation in a separate function makes it
easy to reuse in alternative prime generation strategies
- the available constraints support applications such as Maurer's
algorithm for generating provable primes, or strong primes for RSA
in which both p-1 and p+1 have a large factor. So those become
things we could experiment with in future.
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Mostly because I just had a neat idea about how to expose that large
mutable array without it being a mutable global variable: make it a
static in its own module, and expose only a _pointer_ to it, which is
const-qualified.
While I'm there, changed the name to something more descriptive.
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