- Skipped keys
The purpose of limiting the number of skipped keys generated is to avoid a dos
attack whereby an attacker would send a large N, forcing the device to
compute all the keys between currentN..N .
Previously the logic for handling skipped keys was:
- If in the current receiving chain there are more than maxSkip keys,
throw an error
This is problematic as in long-lived session dropped/unreceived messages starts
piling up, eventually reaching the threshold (1000 dropped/unreceived
messages).
This logic has been changed to be more inline with signals spec, and now
it is:
- If N is > currentN + maxSkip, throw an error
The purpose of limiting the number of skipped keys stored is to avoid a dos
attack whereby an attacker would force us to store a large number of
keys, filling up our storage.
Previously the logic for handling old keys was:
- Once you have maxKeep ratchet steps, delete any key from
currentRatchet - maxKeep.
This, in combination with the maxSkip implementation, capped the number of stored keys to
maxSkip * maxKeep.
The logic has been changed to:
- Keep a maximum of MaxMessageKeysPerSession
and additionally we delete any key that has a sequence number <
currentSeqNum - maxKeep
- Version
We check now the version of the bundle so that when we get a bundle from
the same installationID with a higher version, we mark the previous
bundle as expired and use the new bundle the next time a message is sent
Andrea Maria Piana