Re: beep+sasl+srp draft issues

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.sacred
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Stephen Farrell <[email protected]> writes:

> Dale,
> 
>> > - We want to hash the userid in case the user types her
>> > password into the "username" box. We could do this above
>> > SASL-SRP or else could try get the SASL-SRP draft to include
>> > the trick itself (I prefer the latter). Any opinions?
>> 
>> preference 1)  skip it.  do appropriate UI checking in the client
>> 
>> preference 2)  send in hash(user-id) as part of SASL-SRP authenticated login
>> sequence.
> 
> Ok - that's three opinions (more?)

A minor point, but since SRP was designed to counter dictionary
attacks, the hash(user-id) "fix" might end up being less secure than
SRP, since you then can perform dictionary attacks on the
hash(user-id) value that is transfered.  This would probably only be a
practical problem if servers' blindly start to swap username/password
to "help" clueless clients/users, instead of failing. Perhaps that
wasn't the intention, and that servers MUST fail if they encounter
swapped username/password fields.

My point is that the hash(user-id) fix adds complexity that might
obscure what is really going on.  Maybe either ignore the problem, or
treat both username and password as sensitive information, instead of
chosing a weak scheme for one of the fields (username).
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