Matthew Toseland wrote: > You're talking about geeks. And even they don't usually go to the effort. But > this whole conversation kicked off when you said files were inconvenient. :)
They are inconvenient - if I could convince the rest of the world to use short refs, I would. But not passwords, that would be a step backwards. ;-) > I still don't see how you are going to use them. Bob makes up a password and > gives it to Alice out of band over the phone. Alice proves she has the > password through a challenge/response. Alice gets 3 tries. What's the attack > vector? Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were proposing that there should be no up-front exchange of pubkeys/passwords, but after establishing the connection it should be checked for MITM attacks by generating a password from the JFK pubkeys and verifying it OOB (like Zfone does). But you weren't, so forget I mentioned it and substitute my usual objection to an up-front exchange of passwords: the users won't use a secure channel, tampering with channels is harder than observing them, so pubkeys are preferable to passwords. > Impossible without two way exchange of very long lines of text, with at least > one way untamperable. Which is not remotely realistic, except in the trivial > case of sending an encrypted email. 35 characters of base32 (IP + port + 128-bit pubkey hash) is not remotely realistic? It's only four phone numbers! :-) Cheers, Michael
