From: winst...@gmail.com [winst...@gmail.com] on behalf of Keith Winstein 
[kei...@mit.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, 31 December 2013 8:47 p.m.
> I'd be happy to participate on IRC if you think that would be helpful -- just 
> let me know the date/time.

Currently I'm on at 13:20 WST (Perth, Australia) on Thursday 9 Jan. I don't 
know your timezone, but that'll be between 9pm and midnight on *Wednesday* for 
the US 
(http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=lca2014mosh&iso=20140109T13&p1=196).
 If you could start up a new IRC channel for this, I'll pop it up onscreen 
during the Q&A.

> From a cryptographic perspective, Mosh (with its pinned AEAD mode) is 
> probably better than SSH's encrypt-and-MAC and also better than TLS's 
> MAC-then-encrypt.

What makes me uncomfortable at the moment is that if feels like you're using 
only a single factor to represent permission to connect to a server (the UDP 
port and sequence numbers seem to be too public to count as reliable factors), 
whereas traditionally we spend time on multi-factor-authentication. It's a 
handwave to say that you defer to ssh for authentication, because that's only 
true for starting the server; at every point after that your key represents 
full authentication. Everyone else's session keys are tied up with the TCP 
source, which isn't the strongest factor in the world but is better than 
nothing.

However, just because I'm uncomfortable with it doesn't mean I'm right :-) In 
order to have a proper argument with you about the datagram layer, I'm going to 
have to do a lot of research & learning (or convince some people I know who 
already know this stuff to do it for me!).

> You're right that a bad guy who steals the session key from a mobile device 
> can "roam" the session elsewhere. Compromise of the client is a difficult 
> attack to counteract.

Compromise of the client device is basically undetectable *by the client*; in 
general when we look at security from a higher level we are profiling behaviour 
between systems and looking for that to change. The server is the 
best-qualified point at which to manage this sort of thing (not least because 
the server can decrypt the packets), which is one reason why more logging will 
help tremendously. Perhaps having the logging policy in an /etc file would help 
people to set a local 'default' nicely, without end-users having to remember to 
invoke it every time.

-jim
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