Proposal: one-time passwords

Matthew Toseland <toad-EI5O+8PHWbJeeLb3ft/[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.freenet.technical
Message-ID <[email protected]>
One-time passwords
==================

Note that this was not my idea! Colin Davis is probably the most
directly responsible person.

Fproxy provides an interface to create, or set, one-time passwords.
These are time-limited, single-use, human-readable keys which enable a
bootstrap connection to your node.

You give a friend your IP address, port number, and a one-time password.
This can be used precisely once. It can however be used by a newbie.

The recipient sets up a node, or already has one. He types in the IP
address, port number and the one-time password. The node connects to
that IP address and sends a hash of the password and the current time
(and some random data etc to start to set up encryption for the rest
of the exchange, encrypted using another hash of the password). If the
node recognises the password, a reference exchange ensues and the nodes
get connected.

Dependancies
------------

The node issuing one-time passwords must be able to receive packets
from anywhere on the internet. So we need UP&P.

Attacks
-------

A brute-force/dictionary attack may be mounted by an attacker. We can
either hope that he doesn't hit the right password (reasonable if it is
computer generated and long, or is very short lived; not so reasonable
otherwise), or we can shut down the introduction mechanism if we see too
many attempts (this is turning it into a DoS).

A dictionary attack on captured traffic may reveal this protocol, hence
allow the attacker to find nodes passively.

An active man-in-the-middle attack should not be feasible unless the
attacker can guess the password, assuming the protocol is well-designed
(it isn't really designed at all right now).

_______________________________________________
Tech mailing list
[email protected]
http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 189 B)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFF7MjCA9rUluQ9pFARAsvZAJ9KvBmYUq8ZwRhpgbOy0BV818D9lQCdGgfR
EfhDCUMl634PFsIoNwop7fY=
=4glN
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.