Re: [http-auth] Normalization forms in draft-ietf-httpauth-basicauth-enc

Yaron Sheffer <yaronf.ietf@gmail.com> Sun, 30 June 2013 21:14 UTC

Return-Path: <yaronf.ietf@gmail.com>
X-Original-To: http-auth@ietfa.amsl.com
Delivered-To: http-auth@ietfa.amsl.com
Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ietfa.amsl.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6391721F9C6E for <http-auth@ietfa.amsl.com>; Sun, 30 Jun 2013 14:14:05 -0700 (PDT)
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at amsl.com
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Score: -102.599
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-102.599 tagged_above=-999 required=5 tests=[BAYES_00=-2.599, USER_IN_WHITELIST=-100]
Received: from mail.ietf.org ([12.22.58.30]) by localhost (ietfa.amsl.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id Lm+JmvT-kCxt for <http-auth@ietfa.amsl.com>; Sun, 30 Jun 2013 14:14:04 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from mail-wg0-x236.google.com (mail-wg0-x236.google.com [IPv6:2a00:1450:400c:c00::236]) by ietfa.amsl.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9038421F9C39 for <http-auth@ietf.org>; Sun, 30 Jun 2013 14:14:04 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by mail-wg0-f54.google.com with SMTP id n11so3241151wgh.9 for <http-auth@ietf.org>; Sun, 30 Jun 2013 14:14:03 -0700 (PDT)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20120113; h=message-id:date:from:user-agent:mime-version:to:cc:subject :references:in-reply-to:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; bh=0wmJyq3OEN1Bz+lOIO1w168Qf4rgUv6HRpdLbstfNRA=; b=B9o2SStrAwuybiWt/GyEFndBuh6i7puTS0W69XtF/mIuv77ojHScvyMmIdBBBoh5LD owAi52FTjwoiE20frx760xLH3QwycQXSwIKwZHFY4UOxOd0VD+CDE9QrbGqLuGcuSYla HVf0u4Hsdcs0zEtIbj2/qqm3mblyLQSBn+Jid9Icn277HZO9AGRSPvpMkRPp57LCe6It Kjp9hKTGs5TsydyAsHfyZMNyugrkyUnn5B4izZIvtmlaFL7WwPDo2YclDqTo8xUw4A35 ZZIJHXX4SMD2HFLPiDqyJbGtEbZXyy3zBXYUZ+RHteFckVnN+tpw1DzWQwm3tVtNARBC K3iA==
X-Received: by 10.194.63.46 with SMTP id d14mr18304301wjs.81.1372626843738; Sun, 30 Jun 2013 14:14:03 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from [10.0.0.3] ([109.64.109.19]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPSA id dv12sm10341112wic.3.2013.06.30.14.14.01 for <multiple recipients> (version=TLSv1 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA bits=128/128); Sun, 30 Jun 2013 14:14:02 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <51D09F98.2070508@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:14:00 +0300
From: Yaron Sheffer <yaronf.ietf@gmail.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130623 Thunderbird/17.0.7
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org>
References: <20130630142838.31885.15315.idtracker@ietfa.amsl.com> <51D04326.5060600@gmx.de> <DEA2EA74-7587-4CAA-9424-4478B136308E@vpnc.org>
In-Reply-To: <DEA2EA74-7587-4CAA-9424-4478B136308E@vpnc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format="flowed"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, http-auth@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [http-auth] Normalization forms in draft-ietf-httpauth-basicauth-enc
X-BeenThere: http-auth@ietf.org
X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.12
Precedence: list
List-Id: HTTP authentication methods <http-auth.ietf.org>
List-Unsubscribe: <https://www.ietf.org/mailman/options/http-auth>, <mailto:http-auth-request@ietf.org?subject=unsubscribe>
List-Archive: <http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/http-auth>
List-Post: <mailto:http-auth@ietf.org>
List-Help: <mailto:http-auth-request@ietf.org?subject=help>
List-Subscribe: <https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/http-auth>, <mailto:http-auth-request@ietf.org?subject=subscribe>
X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2013 21:14:05 -0000

Paul, your proposed text doesn't make sense to me, because with Basic 
auth, the server might keep a hash of the password instead of the raw 
password (to reduce the damage if the entire database gets stolen). In 
which case I would expect the server to normalize the password before it 
is being hashed without any check of the "expected value".

Thanks,
	Yaron

On 2013-06-30 21:22, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> On Jun 30, 2013, at 7:39 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
>
>> For now, there's one open issue left: we currently do not say anything about Unicode normalization forms, but we probably should.
>
> -1. This has made other protocols less interoperable with little perceptable benefit.
>
> Normalization is useful for preventing false negatives (where you want an unnormalized string to match a normalized string because they are "equivalent"), at the expense of one or both parties needing to have a normalization engine that is kept up to date, covers all scripts, and so on.
>
> At most, the spec might say "the server might want to do some normalization if a password does not exactly match with the server's expected value in case the client used a different set of characters to indicate the same password", but no more.
>
> --Paul Hoffman
> _______________________________________________
> http-auth mailing list
> http-auth@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/http-auth
>