Improve encryption strength for session passwords

[rcubetrac]

Reported by @thomascube on 24 Mar 2014 08:00 UTC as Trac ticket #1489719

Using Mcrypt and this nifty wrapper class:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5089841/php-2-way-encryption-i-need-to-store-passwords-that-can-be-retrieved

Migrated-From: http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1489719

[rcubetrac]

Comment by @alecpl on 24 Mar 2014 08:33 UTC

The class author says "an encryption and decryption cycle takes about 1/2 second on my machine" which might be noticeable in our case (we decrypt password on every IMAP login). We should check performance impact.

[rcubetrac]

Comment by @alecpl on 2 Sep 2015 17:53 UTC

Our current implementation based on openssl_encrypt() is good enough. Some sources discourage use of mcrypt e.g. http://thefsb.tumblr.com/post/110749271235/using-opensslendecrypt-in-php-instead-of.

The only thing to consider is algorithm we use. Maybe using AES instead of 3DES would give us more security (and/or performance). Starting from PHP7 we could use also better random_bytes generator (http://php.net/manual/en/function.random-bytes.php).

[rcubetrac]

Comment by @alecpl on 2 Sep 2015 18:29 UTC

On my laptop with PHP7, encrypt+decrypt methods using AES-256-CBC algorithm is 100% faster than with DES-EDE3-CBC. Also, I see we can get rid of the canary byte and padding handling.

[rcubetrac]

Milestone changed by @alecpl on 2 Sep 2015 18:29 UTC

later => 1.2-beta

[rcubetrac]

Comment by @alecpl on 7 Sep 2015 07:49 UTC

Fixed in e4c6608. Added cipher_method option, which defaults to 'DES-EDE3-CBC' for bachward compatibility. Also removed canary byte and padding handling. Finally, des_key don't need to be 24-chars long anymore.

[rcubetrac]

Status changed by @alecpl on 7 Sep 2015 07:49 UTC

new => closed