Re:1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s
by tptacek on Wednesday April 17, 2013 @12:05PM
(#5565223)
I think you mean CBC mode IV, not CTR mode IV. If they'd been using CTR mode, not having the nonce would be a dealbreaker for the attack; no matter what the cracker did, it would never generate the right keystream.
(I don't think using CTR mode would have made a lot of sense and am not saying the use of CBC mode is a design weakness; it isn't.)
Re:1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s
by marshray on Wednesday April 17, 2013 @12:12PM
(#5565278)
D'oh! Thanks, corrected.
And I was just on everyone else for conflating CTR mode nonces and CBC mode IVs...
The other factor-of-two, i.e., the 1-bit attack, comes from skipping the generation of the CBC mode IV and only generating 1 output block (160 bits) of PBKDF2 output for the key and using a later ciphertext block to check the candidate password. This saves the attacker half of the PBKDF2 work factor.
This is a weakness in PBKDF2 when used to generate key material longer than the underlying hash function output length. RFC 2898 explicitly endorses deriving multiple keys in the manner 1Password used it:
... without mentioning the fact that some of the derived keys would impose more work factor than others.