On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 3:53 PM, Kurt Zeilenga <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I have number of concerns.
>
> I am concerned that a client or the user would not know why SASL 
> authentication was being offered, what id to use, etc..   Aside from user 
> confusion, I fear attackers will actually highjack the S2S connections 
> between the S2S server and the MUC server, offer SASL/PLAIN (or terribly weak 
> mechanism) to the clients in hopes users will enter the password they use to 
> authenticate to their server.
>
> I rather not open such attack doors.

I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing.  I want to use
something like DIGEST
authentication to send the *room* credentials and not the user's credentials.

I don't see how having a non-cleartext authentication mechanism for
MUC rooms changes any security issues that might already be present
via a MUC room service.


>
> As previously noted in this thread, one can mitigate replay attacks by 
> including a timestamp in the hash (as well as subscriber and room jids)... 
> and the replay can only be mounted by someone who takes control of the 
> subscriber's server or S2S sessions or C2S sessions.  If an attacker has 
> comprised the system to the point of being able to replay, they generally 
> would have the ability to mount a wide range of attacks which SASL 
> authentication by itself will do little to protect against.

That's the point of using a nonce and other aspects of various
challenge base authentication mechanism.  I don't see why we would
develop a new method.

-- 
--Alex Milowski
"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
considered."

Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics
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