Re: beep+sasl+srp draft issues

Stephen,

Thanks for the summary. Just two more comments:

On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, Stephen Farrell wrote:

[...]
> > - The sacred-pdm draft had an "extra" rsa private key which
> > was used for signing credential uploads - do we want to
> > maintain this feature? (The reason for it was to make
> > it harder to benefit from stealing the server's database.)
>
> No-one argued to keep the "extra" key, so it's gone. However,
> whether to allow support for something "better" than just SRP
> for uploads (e.g. signing) is still an issue - I'll think
> about this a bit more and send a separate mail.

I think we certainly should _allow_ for alternate methods for the
upload. This could include a PKI-based upload, e.g. along the lines of
Mike Just's scenario were the user is in possession of a private key
certified by an authority trusted by the credential server. If SASL is
being used, this (allowing other methods) should be virtually a no-op.

> > - SASL-SRP makes it easy to authenticate and derive keys for
> > credential download, changes etc, but what about initial
> > registration? Is that to be offline only or do we need
> > to have a credential deposit operation that uses some other
> > "in-payload" security?
>
> I wasn't clear describing this one: what I wanted to know was
> whether we need to support a secure form of on-line user
> self-registration. (We clearly need to allow, but not specify
> mechanisms for, out-of-band/offline/bulk registration.)
>
> I got the (not very strong:-) impression that folks do want to
> support this, so I'll try to include something.

That's fine, I should not prioritize this work however, as the focus
right now probably should be on the down- and up-load.(?)

-- Magnus