Filename: 221-stop-using-create-fast.txt Title: Stop using CREATE_FAST Authors: Nick Mathewson Created: 12 August 2013 Target: 0.2.5.x Status: Open
0. Summary
I propose that in 0.2.5.x, Tor clients stop sending CREATE_FAST cells, and use CREATE or CREATE2 cells instead as appropriate.
1. Introduction
The CREATE_FAST cell was created to avoid the performance hit of using the TAP handshake on a TLS session that already provided what TAP provided: authentication with RSA1024 and forward secrecy with DH1024. But thanks to the introduction of the ntor onionskin handshake in Tor 0.2.4.x, for nodes with older versions of OpenSSL, the TLS handshake strength lags behind with the strength of the onion handshake, and the arguments against CREATE no longer apply.
Similarly, it's good to have an argument for circuit security that survives possible breakdowns in TLS. But when CREATE_FAST is in use, this is impossible: we can only argue forward-secrecy at the first hop of each circuit by assuming that TLS has succeeded.
So let's simply stop sending CREATE_FAST cells.
2. Proposed design
Currently, only clients will send CREATE_FAST, and only when they have FastFirstHopPK set to its default value, 1.
I propose that we change "FastFirstHopPK" from a boolean to also allow a new default "auto" value that tells Tor to take a value from the consensus. I propose a new consensus parameter, "usecreatefast", default value taken to be 1.
Once enough versions of Tor support this proposal, the authorities should set the value for "usecreatefast" to be 0.
In the series after that (0.2.6.x?), the default value for "FastFirstHopPK" should be 0.
(Note that CREATE_FAST must still be used in the case where a client has connected to a guard node or bridge without knowing any onion keys for it, and wants to fetch directory information from it.)
3. Alternative designs
We might make some choices to preserve CREATE_FAST under some circumstances. For example, we could say that CREATE_FAST is okay if we have a TLS connection with a cipher, public key, and ephemeral key algorithm of a given strength.
We might try to trust the TLS handshake for authentication but not forward secrecy, and come up with a first-hop handshake that did a simple curve25519 diffie-hellman.
We might use CREATE_FAST only whenever ntor is not available.
I'm rejecting all of the above for complexity reasons.
We might just change the default for FastFirstHopPK to 1 in 0.2.5.x-alpha. It would make early users of that alpha easy for their guards to distinguish.
4. Performance considerations
This will increase the CPU requirements on guard nodes; their cpuworkers would be more heavily loaded as 0.2.5.x is more adopted.
I believe that, if guards upgrade to 0.2.4.x as 0.2.5.x is under development, the commensurate benefits of ntor will outweigh the problems here. This holds even more if we wind up with a better ntor implementation or replacement.
5. Considerations on client detection
Right now, in a few places, Tor nodes assume that any connection on which they have received a CREATE_FAST cell is probably from a non-relay node, since relays never do that. Implementing this proposal would make that signal unreliable.
We should do this proposal anyway. CREATE_FAST has never been a reliable signal, since "FastFirstHopPK 0" is easy enough to type, and the source code is easy enough to edit. Proposal 163 and its successors have better ideas here anyway.