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Analysis of Passport Flaws
An anonymous reader sent us an excellent (and technical) paper describing problems with Passport its not lame anti ms rhetoric, its actually a well written technical assesment of security problems with the unified login that passport aims to achieve. This is a good read.
And that was the point.
Now you can't discuss the weaknesses you find in an open forum so they can be addressed. You can only discuss it illegally through encrypted e-mail with others who will exploit them.
The DMCA was NOT an improvement.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There's nothing particularly wrong with single-signon, just so as long it is done securely and the data of everyone on the planet isn't stored in one bank. Users are going to like the convience that Passport provides. Thus, we need a good alternative.
I found this, which discusses a way of doing a Passport-like identification over Jabber, dubbed "Jident". Maybe this, or something like it, could be implemented as a proper open-source/distributed counter to Passport.
Jabber is definitely what the world should be using instead of this new "Windows Messenger". Perhaps an alternative to Passport could be added/layered to it as well? Definitely check out that Jident page, especially the bottom where it lays out the pros and cons (and a neat scenario).
Maybe something like this will be discussed at JabberCon.
-Justin
Probably not, but a secure single sign on would be nice, if the proper privacy and security issues can be addressed. I think that XNS has a chance of doing this type of thing better than any of the closed source alternatively like Passport.
Well, my first question is really "Does anyone outside of Microsoft actually use passport for authentication?" Microsoft uses it a lot for MSN Messenger, Hotmail and all its other stuff, which isn't really bad (for Microsoft products that is). However, I have yet to see Passport used _outside_ of Microsoft.
Then, assuming that other companies do begin to use Passport at a significant level (despite no one using it after months of its deployment), there then becomes the question "What happens when Microsoft denies companies access to passport authentication?" For example, what happens if a Hotmail competitor wishes to use Passport authentication for its web mail login? Clearly, Microsoft would be helping their competitor if they allowed it, and acting monopolistically if they don't. That does provide a small problem for Microsoft.
Third is something that the article points out very early on about the very reason people need something like passport. To paraphrase, the article states that people dislike the idea of their online grocery store having access to their online stock trading when they use the same password. This problem doesn't go away with Passport, it is just enhanced. Now, instead of your grocery store having access to your stocks, Microsoft has access to both your grocery store and your stocks, without doing anything but being a middle man authenticator.
But what am I saying? Microsoft is the good guy, who would never abuse its power. That's why its okay for Microsoft to use its powers to "innovate," just like its okay for the US to develop defensive systems that give it the power to launch nuclear weapons without fear of retaliation.
It sounds to me like it means: "This is not the same punditry you've seen before bemoaning MS being the holder of all keys, it is a technical discussion of the protocol/service".
There was no mention of other Slashdot stories. I think it's assumed that Slashdot readers also consult various other sources of news and information (being that most of the stories are from reader submissions and all)
Slashdot has never been about the editing. It's about geeks swapping info/opinions/war stories/etc about the news of the day.
If you want good editing, visit Linux Weekly News at http://www.lwn.net/. Or if you want to bash other people's editing, you can do that, and have the power to rate the story itself down, so it won't get posted, over at Kuro5hin - http://www.kuro5hin.org/
The first scenario I decided on and implemented was the similar as what Passport is using, but with the 3DES-key optional (so that Merchants with poor web coders could still participate). For the rest of this discussion, I'll only refer to the version with the DES protection.
Also, being a payment system,there was only one ever call and one return with results -- not a login and logout process.
We found that by using various SSL, cookie methods, and so on, we could get around all security flaws, but the downside is that the Merchant has an awful lot of responsibilities, including:
- Verifying, encrypting and decrypting the 3DES keys
- Keeping its 3DES key secure...
- ...which entails keeping its system totally secure from hacking
- Implementing the rest of the protocol to communicate with the Passport etc. server via cookies
- Generating cookies that work correctly in any version of any browser (even getting them to work correctly in one browser is a hassle!)
- Detecting duplicate transactions (for example, J.Hacker does a valid purchase for $1; and records the connection, then comes back later, begins a purchase for $10000, and intercepts the connection and responds with the $1 packet)
and the list goes on. In the end I decided that while it was a security model that held together, and if I were coding for the Merchant I could do it correctly, but there are many Merchants that would simply fail to do it right, and either have it work buggily or insecurely, or not at all, and then blame the system (or the customers would blame the system).It's easy to say "Well, they should do it right," but when you've been in the commercial world a while, you realise just how incompetent many companies are.
In the end, tired of patching up small hole after small hole and writing merchant integration documents, I changed my mind and chose an alternative scheme which may seem harder for Merchants at first, but in fact leaves them as little room for going wrong, even if the transactions run a little slower.
Conclusion? Hack just one of the merchants involved in Passport, grab their 3DES key, and you're in and untraceable (bar the merchant actually keeping valid authentication logs and being able to follow them; in which case the worst that could happen is that they change their 3DES key). The security will deter script kiddies but a hacker with serious skills will have a field day.