matrix-spec-proposals/proposals/2472-symmetric-ssss.md

Symmetric SSSS

MSC1946 (Secure Secret Storage and Sharing) proposed a way of storing encrypted secrets on the server. In the proposal, secrets were encrypted using a Curve25519 key, which was chosen to allow easier migration from key backups that we created before the backup key was stored using it.

However this does not provide any guarantees that data stored using the proposal came from a trusted source. To remedy this, we propose to change the encryption to use AES with a MAC to ensure that only someone who knows the key is able to store data.

Proposal

• The m.secret_storage.v1.curve25519-aes-sha2 method proposed in MSC1946 is removed.

• A new method, m.secret_storage.v1.aes-hmac-sha2, is added. With this method, the Secret Storage key may be any size (though 256 bits is recommended), and data is encrypted as follows:

  1. Given the secret storage key, generate 64 bytes by performing an HKDF with SHA-256 as the hash, a salt of 32 bytes of 0, and with the secret name as the info. The first 32 bytes are used as the AES key, and the next 32 bytes are used as the MAC key
  2. Generate 16 random bytes, set bit 63 to 0 (in order to work around differences in AES-CTR implementations), and use this as the AES initialization vector. This becomes the iv property, encoded using base64.
  3. Encrypt the data using AES-CTR-256 using the AES key generated above. This encrypted data, encoded using base64, becomes the ciphertext property.
  4. Pass the raw encrypted data (prior to base64 encoding) through HMAC-SHA-256 using the MAC key generated above. The resulting MAC is base64-encoded and becomes the mac property.

  (We use AES-CTR to match file encryption and key exports.)

  If the key Secret Storage key is generated from a passphrase, information about how to generate the key is stored in the passphrase property of the key's account-data in a similar manner to what was done with the original m.secret_storage.v1.curve25519-aes-sha2 method, except that there is an optional bits parameter that defaults to 256, and indicates the number of bits that should be generated from PBKDF2 (in other words, the size of the key).

• For the purposes of allowing clients to check whether a user has correctly entered the key, clients should:

  1. encrypt and MAC a message consisting of 32 bytes of 0 as described above, using the empty string as the info parameter to the HKDF in step 1.
  2. store the iv and mac in the m.secret_storage.key.[key ID] account-data.

• The passthrough property specified in the "Enconding the recovery key for server-side storage via MSC1946" section of MSC1219 is removed. The primary purpose of that property was to allow easy migration of pre-MSC1946 backups, so that users could reuse the backup recovery key as the Secret Storage key without needing to re-enter the recovery key. However, since we are now using a symmetric encryption algorithm, the client needs to know the key that is used to encrypt, so the purpose of the field cannot be fulfilled.

• Signing the Secret Storage key with the user's master cross-signing key is no longer required. The key is trusted on the basis of the user entering the key/passphrase.

Potential issues

Users who have data stored using the old encryption algorithm will need their data migrated. Clients that support the old algorithm but not the new algorithm will not be able to use the migrated secrets until they are updated with the new algorithms. This should not be a major problem because the only clients that are known to have implemented the old algorithm are Riot Web/Android/iOS, and they have been upgraded to implement the new algorithm.

Alternatives

Rather than switching to a symmetric encryption algorithm, we could stay with an asymmetric encryption algorithm, and add on a method to authenticate the data. However, it is much safer to use well-known cryptographic methods rather than trying to invent something new. Since the main reason for using an asymmetric scheme was to ease migration from older key backups without requiring the user to re-enter the key, but this is no longer possible due to the need to authenticate the data using the Secret Storage key, there is no reason to stay with an asymmetric algorithm. It is also better to use cryptographic methods already used in Matrix where possible, rather than introducing something new.