Steffen Schulz wrote: > > So its not working against MITM or impersonating the server.
No, it definitely does not. This is what certificates are for. > > The plaintext pw is not transmitted and can not be read by, say, > XSS-stuff. But why would anybody care about the plaintext pw if one > only needs its hash to authenticate to the server? The hashing itself shall not primarily prevent relogons, but rather that the password is revealed to the site (or even the entire world in case of no SSL). The replay salt should prevent relogons. > Additionally, > offline dictionary attacks tend to be easy when dealing with passwords. Brute force always works. Here the salt should help. > > It also doesn't help you to hide the fact that you use the same > password over at some other site, as the hashes are the same. > secret=hash(realm||pw) could be used to counter that. Thats what the salt is for. > > With secure web authentication (hopefully) comming soon, I think > this hash-field is a bad idea. Could you elaborate why it should be a bad idea? > PW-logins should either be dropped > alltogether(hello, Nelson :)) or mechanisms like SRP should be > employed to enhance their security. Well, I dont think it is realistic that password based logins will disappear that soon. > > There could be other applications besides protecting logins. But I > think SSL covers most of them. This is correct, but how many sites actually use SSL? Further it does not solve the problem of the password being revealed to the site. > > Thats my 2 cents, at least. Thank you Steffen, although your posting wasnt extremely pro (and IMHO in certain points not quite balanced) I am glad you joined the discussion as I wanted to start a discussion about this issue with my posting. Alexander _______________________________________________ dev-security mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security
