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x/crypto/nacl/secretbox: document how small is "small" #21139

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kevinburke opened this issue Jul 24, 2017 · 3 comments
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x/crypto/nacl/secretbox: document how small is "small" #21139

kevinburke opened this issue Jul 24, 2017 · 3 comments
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@kevinburke
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kevinburke commented Jul 24, 2017 •
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The documentation for secretbox states:

Package secretbox encrypts and authenticates small messages.

However, it is unclear to a casual reader how small "small" is.

"Validation and Verification" says:

Tests are currently limited to 4096-byte messages. This is one of several reasons that callers should (1) split all data into packets sent through the network; (2) put a small global limit on packet length; and (3) separately encrypt and authenticate each packet.

With a link to more explanation here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/boring-crypto/BpUmNMXKMYQ/EEwAIeQdjacJ

We may want to provide the same advice to callers of this package, and advise them that "small" means "4096 bytes or fewer."
@gopherbot gopherbot added this to the Unreleased milestone Jul 24, 2017
@aead
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aead commented Jul 24, 2017

Dup of #17673

@slrz
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slrz commented Jul 25, 2017

We may want to provide the same advice to callers of this package, and advise them that "small" means "4096 bytes or fewer."

But that's not what it means. Wording like this would give the impression that secretbox doesn't work at all for messages of 8k or 16k size which is obviously wrong. Putting numbers there without any explanation how to arrive at these seems like a bad idea.

DJB's mail to boring-crypto gives the rationale for "small" messages. Link to that, if you must. Also note agl's comments in #17673 and the previous CL addressing this.

@gopherbot
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Change https://golang.org/cl/35910 mentions this issue: nacl/[secret]box: clarify message size comment.

lparth pushed a commit to lparth/crypto that referenced this issue Oct 1, 2018
@agl
nacl/[secret]box: clarify message size comment.
9ba3862 
While package comments shouldn't be novels, this throwaway word was not
sufficient (and wasn't mirrored in the `box` package).

This change attempts to include more reasoning without using too many
words.

Fixes golang/go#17673,golang/go#21139

Change-Id: I7fa11e2cd5b8e2010420cc14d784f9b0c65db6d2
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/35910
Reviewed-by: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>
@dfkoh-gov dfkoh-gov mentioned this issue Nov 8, 2018
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