ImperialViolet

After the last post expla... (16 Apr 2008)

After the last post explained why small curves aren't good enough for obsfucated TCP, I decided that, since I'm going to have to do some damage to the TCP header to get a bigger public key in there anyway, I might as well go the whole way and use curve25519, by djb. Now, djb has forgotton more about elliptic curves than I'll ever know and I feel much happier using a curve that's been designed by him. As you can probably guess from the name, it's a curve over 2255-19 - a prime. So the public keys are 32 bytes long.

In order to get that much public key material into a TCP header, here's my proposed hack: Jumbo TCP options.

djb's sample implementation of curve25519 is written in a special assembly language called qhasm. Sadly, it's so alpha that he's not actually released it. So the sample implementation is for ia32 only, uses the floating point registers and has 5100 lines of uncommented assembly. It is, however, freaking quick.

However, since I have kernel-space in mind for this I've written a C implementation. It's about 1/3 the speed (and I've not really tried to optimise it yet), doesn't use any floating point (since kernel-space doesn't have easy access to the fp registers in Linux) and fuzz testing seems to indicate that it's correct. (At least, it's giving the same answers as djb's code.)

Next step: hacking up the kernel. (And I thought the elliptic curve maths was hard enough.)