Re: [PATCH 1/5 v2] PM / hibernate: Create snapshot keys handler

Stephan Mueller
2019-01-09T07:06:07Z

Am Mittwoch, 9. Januar 2019, 07:58:28 CET schrieb James Bottomley:

Hi James,

> On Wed, 2019-01-09 at 07:45 +0100, Stephan Mueller wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, 9. Januar 2019, 01:44:31 CET schrieb James Bottomley:
> >
> > Hi James,
> >
> > > Actually, it would be enormously helpful if we could reuse these
> > > pieces for the TPM as well.
> >
> > Could you please help me understand whether the KDFs in TPM are
> > directly usable as a standalone cipher primitive or does it go
> > together with additional key generation operations?
>
> They're used as generators ... which means they deterministically
> produce keys from what the TPM calls seeds so we can get crypto agility
> of TPM 2.0 ... well KDFa does. KDFe is simply what NIST recommends you
> do when using EC for a shared key agreement ... and really we shouldn't
> be using ECDH in the kernel without it.
>

Thanks for clarifying. That would mean that indeed we would have hardware-
provided KDF implementations that may be usable with the kernel crypto API.

[...]
>
> > Would it be appropriate, to implement a type cast to a structure from
> > the u8 pointer?
> >
> > E.g. for the aforementioned label/context data, we could define
> > something like
> >
> > struct crypto_kdf_ctr {
> >
> > char *label;
> > size_t label_len;
> > u8 *contextU;
> > size_t contextU_len;
> > u8 *contextV;
> > size_t contextV_len;
> >
> > };
> >
> > And the implementation of the generate function for CTR KDF would
> >
> > then have a type cast along the following lines:
> > if (slen != sizeof(struct crypto_kdf_ctr))
> >
> > return -EINVAL;
> >
> > const struct crypto_kdf_ctr *kdf_ctr_input = (struct
> >
> > crypto_kdf_ctr *)src;
> >
> >
> > For different KDFs, different structs would be needed.
>
> Actually, we probably just need the input key (or secret material), the
> concatenation and the number of output bits.

Thanks for confirming. Though, when it comes to HKDF (not that I see it being
needed or required in the kernel), there is a need to split up the src pointer
since the mentioned input is used in different ways.

In order to try to get the implementation and thus the interface right, I
would suggest to at least have a consensus on how to handle such situations.

Thus, would the proposal be acceptable for such KDFs that may need to have
different components communicated as input to the KDF?

Ciao
Stephan