OTP, deployability.

[Nico Williams]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 1:49 PM, Dmitri Pal <dpal at redhat.com> wrote:
> It is not too hard. It is risky.

No, it's no more risky than having a Kerberos KDC infrastructure, with
KDB replication, backups, etcetera.

The KDB stores secrets.  The OTP server stores secrets.  Compromise of
either is catastrophic.  Both require the same level of care.
Therefore it isn't farfetched to have one have some privileged access
to the other, particularly if in so doing you get better security for
the whole system.

There are two ways to get this integration: a) have the OTP server
output the OTPs to the KDCs, b) have the KDCs pass the
PA-ENC-TIMESTAMP data and passwords to the OTP server for it to
validate.  Either way will no doubt scare you equally.  Either way
does not scare me anymore than having KDCs or OTP servers scares me --
any time you have authentication infrastructure what you get is highly
sensitive services, whether they be CAs, KDCs, OTP servers, other AAA,
etcetera.

That's Roland's proposal, in short: better overall security by having
closer integration of the Kerberos KDC and OTP server infrastructure.

> IMO it is a bad security practice to expose the OTPs in an interface.
> Such interface would definitely become an attack target. Ant it is much
> easier to attack than the recent attacks against RSA.

The KDC is already a target.  See above.

Nico
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