Re: storing an explicit nonce

Greetings,

* Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2021 at 01:54:21PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> > On 2021-05-25 15:34:04 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > My point is that we have to full-page-write cases where we change the
> > > nonce --- we get a new LSN/nonce for free if we are using the LSN as the
> > > nonce. What has made this approach much easier is that you basically
> > > tie a change of the nonce to require a change of LSN, since you are WAL
> > > logging it and every nonce change has to be full-page-write WAL logged.
> > > This makes the LSN-as-nonce less fragile to breakage than a custom
> > > nonce, in my opinion, which may explain why my patch is so small.
> >
> > This disregards that we need to be able to increment nonces on standbys
> > / during crash recovery.
> >
> > It may look like that's not needed, with an (wrong!) argument like: The
> > only writes come from crash recovery, which always are associated with a
> > WAL record, guaranteeing nonce increases. Hint bits are not an issue
> > because they don't mark the buffer dirty.
> >
> > But unfortunately that analysis is wrong. Consider the following
> > sequence:
> >
> > 1) replay record LSN X affecting page Y (FPI replay)
> > 2) write out Y, encrypt Y using X as nonce
> > 3) crash
> > 4) replay record LSN X affecting page Y (FPI replay)
> > 5) hint bit update to Y, resulting in Y'
> > 6) write out Y', encrypt Y' using X as nonce
> >
> > While 5) did not mark the page as dirty, it still modified the page
> > contents. Which means that we'd encrypt different content with the same
> > nonce - which is not allowed.
> >
> > I'm pretty sure that there's several other ways to end up with page
> > contents that differ, despite the LSN not changing.
>
> Yes, I can see that happening. I think occasional leakage of hint bit
> changes to be acceptable. We might decide they are all acceptable.

I don't think that I agree with the idea that this would ultimately only
leak the hint bits- I'm fairly sure that this would make it relatively
trivial for an attacker to be able to deduce the contents of the entire
8k page. I don't know that we should be willing to accept that as a
part of regular operation (which we generally view crashes as being). I
had thought there was something in place to address this though. If
not, it does seem like there should be.

Thanks,

Stephen