Kerberos n00b question.

Grant Taylor gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net
Mon Jan 7 13:06:46 EST 2019


On 01/07/2019 10:53 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I don't think describing it as "in the clear" is quite right, but a 
> default Kerberos configuration using enc-timestamp and no tunneling as 
> the preauth mechanism is somewhat vulnerable to packet capture followed 
> by an off-line dictionary attack to recover the authentication key.

Sorry, "in the clear" may have been a poor choice of words.  I was 
meaning to imply "revealed more than desired in an untrusted ~> hostile 
network", particularly in the context of between clients and the KDC.

> The standard solution for this is FAST, which protects the initial 
> authentication against this attack.  (You do need some other credential 
> to set up the FAST tunnel, but you can use anonymous Diffie-Hellman via 
> anonymous PKINIT, or you can use a randomized key.)

Would you please expand (what I assume is) the FAST acronym?  I expect 
that there will be quite a few phonetic collisions searching for "FAST".

> The attack still requires subsequent work; you can't just snoop the 
> connection between the client and the KDC and immediately get credentials. 
> The work factor is basically linked to the complexity of the client key, 
> so it's not much of a worry for a randomized key but is a worry for 
> user passwords.

Good to know.  Thank you for explaining.

> Yes.

:-)

> I don't have a good answer for this, unfortunately.

Fair enough.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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