Re: [VoT] Missing RP / IdP authentication entirely

[Chris Drake <[e-mail]>]

Hi Justin,

This spec seems doomed to repeating the mistakes of OpenID - all the stuff they shoved into the "out of scope" basket came back to haunt them almost immediately.

Trust is a two-way street.  You can't call this "VoT" if you explicitly exclude half the trust.  VoT brings nothing if it has no desire to improve on the status quo!

" communicating the state of the transaction from the idp to the rp " *absolutely requires* that the RP has confidence that the IdP is communicating with the user and not a proxy.  This is a concept (impersonation resistance) not a technology (embedded hardware certificate devices) - VoT offers the chance for this vector to be communicated outside the vendor-obscured lines of technology.  If it's not included, communicating a valuable bit of state information (and one that's near-universally exploited in the wild!) is not going to be possible.

Kind Regards,
Chris Drake


Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 12:26:12 PM, Justin Richer wrote:


This spec isn't about solving primary authentication to the idp, it's about communication the state of the transaction from the idp to the rp. As you observed, this is very explicitly and deliberately about the user, not about the systems. We considered adding that kind of information in early on, but it was decided that such issues are better solved by discovery and registration protocols. VoT isn't the right tool for that, and any complete solution is going to have multiple tools working together. It should be in a standard but not here, working at a different level. This is about users, not machines. 

Verifier impersonation resistance can be communicated here already as the vector's C value can describe that the user underwent an authentication process that meets that standard. NIST's implementation of VoT under 800-63 does exactly that. VoT doesn't say how to meet that, that's what the rest of 800-63 is for, on the NIST side. Other trust frameworks will have their own anchors. 

--Justin

 Sent from my phone

-------- Original message --------
From: Chris Drake <[e-mail]> 
Date: 11/28/17 2:46 AM (GMT+01:00) 
To: Jim Fenton <[e-mail]>, "Grassi, Paul A. (Fed)" <[e-mail]> 
Cc: [e-mail], Justin Richer <[e-mail]>, John Bradley <[e-mail]>, Leif Johansson <[e-mail]>, Phil Hunt <[e-mail]> 
Subject: [VoT] Missing RP / IdP authentication entirely 

Hi All,

Completely missing from the standard are any "two directional" vectors:

100% of the work here is user-focussed, with no attention on RP / IdP legitimacy - a huge mistake, since 91% of successful attacks against authentication take advantage of the completely-missing "machine to user" authentication step (e.g. NIST "Verifier Impersonation Resistance").

I can't decide if this needs to be a new set of vectors, or if it makes sense to incorporate into one of the existing ones:

*. Who is the RP, and how certain is the User/IdP that the RP is legitimate ?
*. Who is the IdP, and how certain is the RP/User that the IdP is legitimate ?
*. What steps has the IdP taken to ensure the users and RPs are not duped ?

What I am certain about, is that it needs to be in the standard.  It makes NO SENSE to put all this effort into something that addresses only 9% of the problem.  NIST recently fixed this, so should we.

Kind Regards,
Chris Drake