Re: [kitten] Fwd: I-D Action: draft-melnikov-scram-2fa-00.txt

[Greg Hudson <[e-mail]>]

On 3/19/20 9:25 AM, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
> (If I remember correctly I also talked to Dave Cridland about doing a
> more generic extension to the SASL framework itself by allowing
> protocols to invoke multiple SASL mechanism in a sequence and achieving
> 2FA that way. I would be interested in developing this concept as well,
> but it would take longer than just extending some existing SASL mechanisms.)

Possible concerns:

* If I attempt to authenticate with guessed credentials for each factor,
can I tell if one of the guesses was correct?  (Not everyone cares about
this property, but it's a legitimate concern if both factors are weak
enough to be guessable.)

* If I know one of the factors, can I MITM a connection between a client
and server and pass through the other-factor messages while retaining
control of the session?

* How does the number of authentication round trips compare to a tight
coupling of the two factors into one mechanism?

* Does the combining framework work for out-of-band "factors" like SMS
or phone confirmation?

* Is there a risk of mechanisms being used alone when they were only
designed to be secure in combination with other mechanisms?  Can that
risk be mitigated?  (Example: a simple OTP mechanism designed for use
with a verify-only back end might not be much more secure than PLAIN
unless combined with a more complicated mechanism using a different kind
of credential.)