Re: [secdir] [xmpp] SecDir review of draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis-17

Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im> Mon, 01 November 2010 20:27 UTC

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Subject: Re: [secdir] [xmpp] SecDir review of draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis-17
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On 11/1/10 12:20 PM, Florian Zeitz wrote:
> On 01.11.2010 10:25, Yaron Sheffer wrote:
>>
>>>> - 15: if we insist on PLAIN, I would expect a security-mti-auth-order
>>>> feature, where the proposals are ordered right (i.e. with PLAIN at the
>>>> end).
>>>
>>> I think it's better to remove TLS plus SASL PLAIN from the list of
>>> mandatory-to-implement technologies.
>>>
>> OK.
>>
> FWIW, I'm not entirely content with that for two reasons:
> a) Even if TLS+SASL PLAIN is not MTI people still will and do implement
> it. I think it would therefore make sense to still specify that PLAIN
> shall only be used as a "last resort".

I think that's what we were trying to say in the text, but we didn't do
a good job of it.

> b) (which is my bigger concern) As strange as that may sound, we need
> PLAIN in order to upgrade to a new mechanism. I though this was also
> explicit in 3920bis, but I can't find it right now.
> Consider a case where a server only stores the MD5 hash of the password.
> This is sufficient to do PLAIN and DIGEST MD5 auth. But for SCRAM a
> different representation is needed.
> The common way for the server to upgrade is to once offer only PLAIN as
> a mechanism. If that is not possible (clients can choose not to support
> PLAIN) some deployments might be stuck with DIGEST MD5...
> We could mandate that PLAIN is only MTI for clients (servers would
> implement it when they need to), but that would allow for the same
> down-grade attacks that are already possible now (i.e. hopefully none ;) ).

I had forgotten about that use case, so thanks for the reminder.

Sometime in the next 24-48 hours I'll propose rewritten text about MTI
technologies, including TLS + SASL PLAIN. However it requires careful
crafting and unfortunately I don't have time to do that right now.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/