Re: [IPsec] Password-Based Auth: Two criteria comments

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

On Mar 22, 2010, at 11:18 AM, <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Summarizing what I said in the meeting:
> 
> (1) The performance criteria should include performance with large complex secrets (e.g., pre-shared keys), not just the smaller passwords that people can reasonably be expected to remember.
> 
> This is because a password-based authentication mechanism may be usefully applied to shared secret authentication implementations that derive a supposedly strong secret solely from a password (see the discussion of pre-shared key authentication in Section 2.15 of RFC 4306).  Password-based authentication would provides some defense against this and other key generation weaknesses.  The original password that was used to generate the shared secret may no longer be available, so good performance on large complex secrets would enable password based authentication to use the derived (supposedly strong) secret as the password.

IKE already has PSK-based authentication. If my "password" is 9975612f178b31164bef5bb672cbeb1db6437d6459ff1d8a17f12ec73fcd5c92, then I don't need any new-fangled mode, because the authentication described in section 2.15 of RFC 4306 is good enough.

The new mode we're looking for is for giving a little security for people who use the password "yoav71", thinking that nobody would ever guess it.