Showing posts with label srp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label srp. Show all posts

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.