phc-discussions - Re: [PHC] PHC output specifics

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Message-ID: <20150315212049.GA24558@bolet.org>
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2015 22:20:49 +0100
From: Thomas Pornin <pornin@...et.org>
To: discussions@...sword-hashing.net
Subject: Re: [PHC] PHC output specifics

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 05:19:12PM +0000, Zooko O'Whielacronx wrote:
> Encoding and normalization are only the first two tips of the iceberg.

Actually stringprep does not address encoding.

As for normalization, in stringprep you have the choice between no
normalization at all, or NFKC. Section 4 of RFC 3454 includes this
text:

   There is a third form of normalization, Unicode normalization with
   form C.  If a profile is going to use a Unicode normalization, it
   MUST use Unicode normalization form KC.  Form KC maps many
   "compatibility characters" to their equivalents.  Some user interface
   systems make it possible to enter compatibility characters instead of
   the base equivalents.  Thus, using form KC instead of form C will
   cause more strings that users would expect to match to actually
   match.

See in particular the last sentence: using form KC will cause "more
matching than expected", and for passwords I am not sure this is what we
want. In fact I am inclined to think that password hashing should not
use the K* forms; for instance, KC and KD map "²" (latin-1 superscript
'2', easily accessible on some keyboard mappings, e.g. French "azerty")
to "2". Ideal normalization is about suppressing unwanted variations in
internal representations (and thus encodings) while not losing actual
information. The KC and KD forms tend to lose too much information in
the case of passwords: if I use the '²' key in my password, I do not do
it as an alias for the '2' key; if I wanted a '2' I would have typed a
'2', not a '²'. Password processing should keep these two characters
distinct.

(In the same way that if I use '£', it is not to have the same effect as
'#' -- as it nevertheless happens with the old DES-based "crypt"
password hashing, due to the ignored high bits.)

But stringprep forces us to choose between KC normalization, and no
normalization at all, both being, in my opinion, suboptimal.

In general, stringprep is mostly a "mandatory checklist": it forces you,
when you specify a stringprep profile, to think about what you are
doing. It makes the designer aware that not every text is plain ASCII.
This is a good thing. However, if we are to recommend an actual
unambiguous processing scheme, I'd prefer it to be actually one
appropriate for passwords -- so one with NFC (or NFD) normalization, and
stringprep does not allow that.

> I don't know if stringprep comes with more baggage than it is worth

Most of the RFC consists in a copy of the case folding tables from
Unicode 3.2. Normally we do not want to fold cases in passwords; we
might want to _switch_ cases, for the Facebook-like "recover from
CapsLock" feature that we were discussing, but that's a rather different
thing because case-switching is more about inferring the behaviour of
the CapsLock key on the client machine than actually making
Unicode-exact case inversions.

	--Thomas Pornin