Re: [apps-discuss] [saag] Fwd: HTTP MAC Authentication Scheme

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Eran Hammer-Lahav <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> "What is your threat model?"
>
> An eavesdropper grabbing plaintext credentials and using them to gain access to protected resources. That's 99% of it, with the other 1% being that sending plaintext credentials over TLS can still leak due to incorrect implementation, or attacks on dynamic configuration, leading the client to send its plaintext credentials over TLS to the wrong server.

That's what I thought.  If you add channel binding (meaning, to make
it real simple: add the server's certificate, or hash thereof, to the
MAC inputs -- the server cert is available in at least some JavaScript
implementations, like Firefox's) then you'll avoid those attacks that
you mention when using TLS.

It's not clear to me if you want to allow use of this MAC without
using TLS.  From the above I guess so, since the MAC alone will take
care of the eavesdroppers.

Nico
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