Insecure use of ed25519 #55
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py0xc3
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May 3, 2020
I removed the unsafe ed25519 implementation from critical functions: it it still in use when only public information is involved (e.g. verification) but this is not a security problem but it is still very slow. But PyCA's cryptography is used when a private key gets involved. https://github.com/pyca/cryptography is well maintained. So, critical security issues are solved. Still, some things remain to be done: the unsafe ed25519 (see hyperledger-iroha#55) implementation should be completely removed to fully depend on cryptography from PyCA. The latter is faster and remains maintained if imported. The unsafe Ed25519 is also from PyCA (which marked it to be not safe and for testing use only) but was copied to the iroha-python repo, assuming it to be no longer maintained in there. Also, I suggest to remove Ed25519-related functions from IrohaCrypto class in order to use the cryptography module's classes directly. That's faster and easier to maintain on the long term, avoiding many unnecessary functions, serializations, ... in between.
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Security-critical issues solved in #58 - still, further testing of the pull request suggested! |
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Bernstein's python3 reference implementation of ed25519 is not appropriate for production purposes as it makes the python interpreter run functions for which that interpreter is not (cryptographically) designed, creating realistic attack scenarios in many environments.
Your optimization remains incorporating this weakness (line 18-33?).
Still, iroha-python uses your optimization for such purposes: it generates signatures and public keys from secret keys using ./ed25519.py.
Yet, the repository does not make aware of not being eligible for production purposes. Also, https://iroha.readthedocs.io/ suggests using iroha-python for production use.
I suggest to use cryptography with ed25519 / docs which is well maintained and suited for production use. Will have a better performance, too.
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