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Add initial draft of SRP spec#28

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hintjens merged 1 commit intozeromq:masterfrom
luna-duclos:master
Oct 1, 2013
Merged

Add initial draft of SRP spec#28
hintjens merged 1 commit intozeromq:masterfrom
luna-duclos:master

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@luna-duclos
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With this pull request, I'd like to open up a discussion about this draft SRP spec for zeroMQ.
It is by no means finished, but I'd like to gather feedback while I finish it and this is the best way of doing that.

A few of the things open for discussion, as well as obviously this whole document:

  • What hashing algorithm do we want to use ? The obvious choices here seem blake and sha-2. With the recent fuss around the NSA & NIST, perhaps blake is a better choice ?
  • The random prime to pick. The size is the main important difference here, there are primes available ranging from 1024 bits to 8192 bits.
  • The symmetric encryption algorithm to use after the session key has been negotiated.

Comment thread spec_34.txt
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The description is missing a couple of advantageous aspects of the SRP protocol that might be worth including.

  • Mutual authentication of the client and server, both can detect when the other does not know the password (poor-man's certificates)
  • Zero-knowledge password protocol (wire-snooping gains the attacker nothing)
  • It's almost as easy to use as PLAIN but with TLS-quality authentication (reference RFC 5054)

Additionally, I found your use of the word "key" here a little confusing. The server stores a "verifier" but it's more akin to a salted-hash of a password than it is to a PKI key... which is what the use of "key" in this context makes me think of. It's not an incorrect description but it took a bit of thinking to figure out what you meant.

hintjens added a commit that referenced this pull request Oct 1, 2013
Add initial draft of SRP spec
@hintjens hintjens merged commit d7ee950 into zeromq:master Oct 1, 2013
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hintjens commented Oct 1, 2013

I've posted it to http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:34, tagged as "raw". @PSG-Sakari if/when you like. I'll copy-edit the text.

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3 participants