Friday, August 3, 2012

Why nobody uses SRP?

Aside from it being patented in part, the security goal of SRP doesn't quite fit the way we use the Internet these days: it uses a procedure similar to Diffie-Hellman to establish a secure channel based on the username presented.  Meanwhile, we have a standard for anonymous secure channels (TLS) over which we can exchange credentials without further crypto*, and using HTML forms means not being beholden to browser UI, such as HTTP Authorization's ugly modal dialogs with no logout feature.


* Although it would be nice to be able do <input type="password" hashmode="pbkdf2;some-salt" ...> to enable the server to store something other than a cleartext password, without all the dangers of trying to do crypto in javascript.

Bonus chatter: Someone once asked why I would use Digest auth even over TLS.  "In case TLS is broken" didn't appease him, but since then, we've seen high-profile failures like DigiNotar and Comodo, and attacks like BEAST.

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