Re: [TLS] User Defined Key Pair

[Juho Vähä-Herttua <[e-mail]>]

This discussion forced me to take a look at the draft. The whole security of the system seems to be dependant on the security of the "browser plugin" and its key generation and encryption algorithms, which are not defined in the draft. I don't see how this could possibly be an interoperable standard as it is.

On 25.6.2013, at 0.29, "OMAR HASSAN (RIT Student)" <[e-mail]> wrote:

> When the user enrolls into one of those websites, and let's say he will go with the second option of using a usb as a second factor authentication, where the password is something he knows, and the usb is something he has.

What if someone detects this enrollment and sends a new public key for the user before the user has time to fill all the fields? Sounds like a race condition to me.

> Self signed certificate is very dangerous because the user will not have a way to verify the identity of the certificate owner and he could be a victim to a man in the middle attack.

But at least the keys are generated using a truly random seed, instead of part of the seed being predictable (username, password, security question) which actually sounds worse to me.

I don't see how this is different from generating a self signed client cert and verifying it with for example HMAC with username+password+question derived secret. If you already need a custom browser plugin to handle the login, you can put all your custom logic there and use standard TLS for the rest.


Juho