Re: IETF LC Gen-ART review of draft-harkins-salted-eap-pwd-06

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

Daniel Harkins <[e-mail]> writes:
>>It might be worth noting that any salted password remote authorization
>>protocol has the same limitation as this draft's method, viz., that
>>disclosure of the hash of the salted password allows an attacker to
>>impersonate a client.  That is, that this method is not somehow
>>deficient because it also has that property.
>
>   I don't think that is true. The client needs to know the password,
> not the salted
> hash.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I think you're incorrect.  Indeed,
your draft says 

   the salted password from a compromised database can be used directly
   to impersonate the EAP-pwd client

The reason that this impersonation can be done is that this is a
*remote* authorization protocol, and there is no way for the server to
compel the attacker to hash what the attacker knows with the salt and
then transmit the result.  Whereas in a *local* authorization protocol,
the server compels the user to present the supposed password, and then
the server hashes it with the salt.

Dale