Re: [http-auth] Tunisian/Syrian phishing attacks

[Yaron Sheffer <[e-mail]>]

Hi Marsh,

a bit of a late response, but I'd like to offer that these two attacks 
could in fact have been countered by a combination of several ideas that 
we're already familiar with.

Let's assume the following:
1. Users are authenticated to Facebook with a password, using a 
zero-knowledge password protocol (ZKPP), with authentication at the TLS 
or the HTTP layer.
2. In any case, authentication is crypto-bound into the TLS-protected 
session (OK, let's assume Facebook sessions are TLS-protected...).
3. Passwords are stored in the browser's password manager. The browser 
doesn't "paste" the password into a form; rather, the browser only 
releases the password when going through the ZKPP. This is done behind 
the scenes, the user doesn't get to see the plaintext password or even a 
row of asterisks.
4. This is further hardened with an HSTS-like mechanism: only use this 
site if you can perform mutual authentication with it.
5. Also, users are trained *not* to enter their passwords explicitly, 
and will be suspicious when the see a "please enter your password" page.

I suggest that this combination is well protected against phishing 
attacks, without having to rely on trusted JavaScript code or on fancy 
user interface elements.

Thanks,
     Yaron

> From: Marsh Ray<[e-mail]>
> To: Nico Williams<[e-mail]>
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [http-auth] [saag] re-call for IETF http-auth BoF
> Message-ID:<[e-mail]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 06/06/2011 04:44 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
>>   But I'm afraid
>> that the appearance of success will be enough to staunch progress in
>> any other areas, so it may be a now-or-never situation for any
>> alternatives other than JavaScript crypto APIs.
> Don't worry about it, they're not going to work even that well.
>
> They wouldn't have stopped the government of Tunisia from MitMing
> Facebook and inserting Javascript to modify the behavior of the page.
> They wouldn't have stopped the government of Syria from using a BlueCoat
> to perform SSL MitM on Facebook with a bogus self-signed cert either.
>
> Both governments were arresting and shooting their citizens and hacking
> their Facebook credentials. Interestingly, Tunisia controls a trusted
> root CA but didn't bother to use it. Syria doesn't control a widely
> trusted CA, but doesn't seem to need it either.
>
> Sooner or later, people will tire of security theater. We can just try
> to have the best options available when they do.
>
> - Marsh