Re: [Emu] [saag] Feedback on Salted EAP draft

["Dan Harkins" <[e-mail]>]

  Hi Christian,

On Tue, July 14, 2015 10:50 am, Christian Huitema wrote:
[snip]
> The draft is short and clear enough, but it acknowledges a pretty big
> security issue: "the salted
> password from a compromised database can be used directly to impersonate
> the client-- there
> is no dictionary attack needed to recover the plaintext password."
>
> That's a pretty big caveat, but there are still some advantages over
> operating with unsalted passwords. The draft aligns server side password
> management for EAP-pwd  with standard industry practices, which is good.
> In case of server compromise, the immediate effect of the compromise is an
> attack on the already compromised server, and the per-user salt make
> password discovery harder. The security section should be expanded to
> explain this tradeoff.

  Yes, it's a big caveat and, as I mentioned, I'm trying to
be as blunt as possible about it. I have updated the Security
Considerations to include the point you are making about server
compromise and the per-user salt still making password recovery
harder.

> Nits:
>
> - in the abstract, missing "not" in " but did (not?) include support for
> salted passwords."

  Nice catch.

  An -02 version has been posted. Would you please take a look
and let me know whether it satisfactorily addresses your comments?

  regards,

  Dan.