Freedome VPN encryption
Comments
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Hi again,
I noticed that the User psillanp has asked some questions a few days ago which have still not been answered yet (technical specs).
Is the information about the used cipher suite in Freedome really that mega-classified and ultra-top-secret?!
I believe that users would feel much more comfortable with Freedome if you would reveal at least the used cipher suite (as there are a lot of weak cipher suites available, e.g. RC4)...
Cheers,
Cryptoman
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I'm curious too and I've searched Knowledge Base and everywhere else without luck. My guess is because Freedome is quite a new product everything isn't updated in the KB (yet).
As a comparison they have a detailed description in the KB of the encryption for the Password Manager "F-Secure Key", so I don't think they intend to keep it a secret:
http://community.f-secure.com/t5/F-Secure-Key-KB/F-Secure-Key-data-encryption-in/ta-p/36851
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An update: This response concerns our Freedome clients for Android only.
Hello,
I'm sorry for the delay with our response. It has just been a busy week with some sick leaves, no intention to hide the information.
Control channel: TLS, 2048 bit RSA auth, typically AES256+SHA1 HMAC but depends on client capabilities
Data channel: Blowfish with 128-bit key + SHA1 HMACFor data channel we're about to switch to AES-128 instead of Blowfish.
Best regards,
Päivi, Freedome product manager
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@Cryptoman wrote:just wanted to ask if the migration from Blowfish to AES for the data channel has been completed.
New gateway sites deployed recently (Canada, Spain, Netherlands, Italy) already use AES for data encryption from the beginning. We'll also have a new US East Coast site set up soon, with the new VPN parameters.
We're still waiting for a bit more of the old Android clients to get upgraded to support a smooth transition to the new crypto settings on the existing older sites. We found an issue where the client did not figure out the new settings quickly enough on a site which switched VPN parameters, and was left in an unhappy state for quite a while. An updated Android client has already been released a while back, but it takes time before a good percentage of users have upgraded.
Clients which are able to use UDP for the VPN connection are easy, since we support old and new parameter sets on different UDP ports to support the old clients through a transition period, but many clients behind various firewalls are only able to make a VPN connection on TCP port 443, and we'll just have to switch that one to the new parameters at some point.
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AES encryption has recently been enabled for the old sites, too. It took a while, since we wanted to wait for a good percentage of Android clients to be updated to support a smooth transition to the new configuration.
Current Freedome encryption parameters, as of 2014-10-24, for Android:
Control channel: TLS, 2048 bit RSA auth, typically AES256+SHA1 HMAC but depends on client capabilities
Data channel: AES-128 + SHA1 HMAC
For iOS / IPSEC:AES-256 + SHA1 HMAC
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@Cryptoman wrote:
thank you for the new information, but
when will the insecure SHA1 be replaced?Hi,
Actually, SHA1 is not insecure when used for HMAC. The collision resistance of SHA-1 is not good any more, but when using the hash function for HMAC, collision resistance is not required (google around for "sha1 hmac security" for more info). Thus, we do not plan to change the HMAC, since it'd increase the overhead (size of transmitted data) a bit.
We do have some SHA1 signatures in some certificates still in use. There it is more of an issue, and we plan to roll to new certificates within the next 6 months or so (requires clients to be updated).
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@HessuH wrote:AES encryption has recently been enabled for the old sites, too. It took a while, since we wanted to wait for a good percentage of Android clients to be updated to support a smooth transition to the new configuration.
Current Freedome encryption parameters, as of 2014-10-24, for Android:
Control channel: TLS, 2048 bit RSA auth, typically AES256+SHA1 HMAC but depends on client capabilities
Data channel: AES-128 + SHA1 HMAC
For iOS / IPSEC:AES-256 + SHA1 HMAC
Can you confirm which encryption suite freedome supports under Windows?
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