DDS-SECURITY 1.2 RTF Avatar
  1. OMG Issue

DDSSEC12 — Underspecified RSASSA-PSS-SHA256 Salt Length

  • Key: DDSSEC12-92
  • Status: open  
  • Source: Real-Time Innovations ( Dr. Gerardo Pardo-Castellote, Ph.D.)
  • Summary:

    The DDS Security version 1.1 specification mentions:

    If the Participant Private Key is a RSA key, then:

    The value of the c.dsign_algo property shall be “RSASSA-PSS-SHA256”.
    The digital signature shall be computed using the RSASSA-PSS algorithm specified in PKCS #1 (IETF 3447) RSA Cryptography Specifications Version 2.1 [44], using SHA256 as hash function, and MGF1 with SHA256 (mgf1sha256) as mask generation function.
    This RFC is the one aforementioned. It states:

    This encoding method is parameterized by the choice of hash function, mask generation function, and salt length. These options should be fixed for a given RSA key, except that the salt length can be variable (see [31] for discussion). Suggested hash and mask generation functions are given in Appendix B.

    In the appendix, we can see an example where the salt length is the same as the hash length:

    RSASSA-PSS-params ::= SEQUENCE
    Unknown macro:
    Unknown macro:

    { hashAlgorithm [0] HashAlgorithm DEFAULT sha1, maskGenAlgorithm [1] MaskGenAlgorithm DEFAULT mgf1SHA1, saltLength [2] INTEGER DEFAULT 20, trailerField [3] TrailerField DEFAULT trailerFieldBC }

    However, the salt length doesn't have to be the hash length. The WolfSSL and OpenSSL crypto libraries support several options (Openssl doc here and WolfSSL doc here). Our current approach is to use OpenSSL's default option: "maximum permissible value" (pkcsBlockLen - hLen - 2) when signing and auto (detect salt length from the signature) when verifying.

    proposed solution
    The specification should mention the salt length used when generating the signature. Otherwise, it should say that auto must be used when verifying the signature. This would allow interoperability (WolfSSL for example doesn't use auto by default).

  • Reported: DDS-SECURITY 1.1b1 — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 10:02 GMT
  • Updated: Mon, 25 Mar 2024 15:55 GMT