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Re: Secure WWW Access to Server Groups



A security consideration for this proposal:

Let's say I want to get a user's basic auth password for a particular 
group.  I manage to sucker the user into visiting my web server after 
he has authenticated himself to some other server in that group.  If my 
server returns a 401 claiming to be in the target group, will not the
browser hand over the uuencoded username:password to me?
Of course this attack will fail for Digest Auth or Mediated Digest Auth,
but Basic Auth is still the most common form.

Assuming I haven't misunderstood things.... perhaps this could be
fixed by requiring some relation between the group name and any server
claiming to be in this group.

Also, a couple questions:

Were kerberos-based solutions considered for this purpose?  Just curious.

Is there any support for Mediated Digest Authentication in available
browsers and servers?  I know of none.

	Adam

> We recently submitted an internet draft that proposes an extension to
> HTTP to enable authentication to a group of WWW servers. Using this
> extension the user just has to type his user name and password once to
> be able to access all ressources in a particular group of co-operating
> servers. The draft is available as <draft-trommler-http-ext-groups-00.txt>
> from the "usual" sites.
> 
> A prototypical implementation for AIX based on Mosaic and Httpd from NCSA
> can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp.zurich.ibm.com in directory
> /pub/trp/server-groups.
> 
> Regards,
> 	Peter
> 
> -- 
> -----------------------------------------------------------  
> Peter Trommler                  | email: trp@zurich.ibm.com| 
> IBM Zurich Research Laboratory  | home: c/o Fam. Gatti     | 
> Saumerstrasse 4                 | Hornhaldenstrasse 1      | 
> CH-8803 Rueschlikon/Svizzera    | CH-8802 Kilchberg        | 
> Phone: +41-1-724 83 73          | +41-1-715 18 74          | 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> ..., abr *mach* daas mal, waenn dah Lueuet dinne sind...
> 


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