Reusable passwords have long passed their used by dates.

• These are based on “something I know”.
• Knowledge should be shared
• Passwords hard to remember
• Easy for others to discover
  • social engineering
  • brute force attack
  • key capture (hardware/software)

One time passwords (OTP).

• Password is used once and discarded.
• If password is captured it doesn’t matter.
• OTP passwords used for centuries.

OTP Can be generated automatically:

• RSA SecurID OTP token.
• S/Key
• Yubikey

Multifactor Authentication:

• OTP based on something you have. One time pad, etc.
  • If this is stolen, then account is compromised.
• Combine with some other authentication, e.g. something you know.
  • Just stealing the physical item isn’t sufficient to breaking into account.
• Banks can send SMS code to mobile phone, you need to type in code and use this as proof your mobile phone is nearby. Need to trust Telecommunications companies not to divert SMS messages to other phone.

Yubikeys

USB device that emulates the keyboard.

Developed in Sweden by Yubico. Entirely open source. The other technologies, e.g. RSA are locked in to the vendor. Don’t have have buy keys from Yubico, can build your own.

Yubikeys are smaller and lighter then the others. Easy to use. Very cheap. No batteries, as long as hardware works it will continue to work. e.g. 3-5 years. RSA SecureID tag has built in timer, there might be good reasons, but it does force you to buy a new one.

First 12 characters in passwords identifies which yubikey. The rest of the characters are a hex coding of the OTP. Every time you press the key you get a different sequence.

44 character OTP generated. Security based on AES 128 bit key. This key needs to be shared on server.

No need to update client code.

Kerberos requires client be trusted.

Every password has a sequence number. When new password accepted, all old passwords are rendered invalid.

Using Yubico servers for authentication requires high level of trust for availability and keeping AES 128 bit key secure.

16 byte sequence

• 6 byte secret
• 2 byte session counter will overfly in 5 years if doing it every 20 seconds
• 3 byte timestamp
• 1 byte session token counter
• 2 byte pseudo random values
• 2 byte CRC 16 checksum

This is encrypted with AES-128 encryption. 6 byte public id is prepended. The result is ModHex encoded.

Cannot change counters via computer. Can change the AES key, secret, and the public id. Cannot access the AES key. Can change it instead. Once reprogrammed it is not possible to use it on Yubico servers anymore.

Can also store reusable password. Why would you want to do so? Allow visitors to program WPA key quickly and easily.

Weaknesses

Requires USB port. How can you trust device? Might be a USB keyboard logger. Especially under Windows. If your computer trusts devices that act as keyboards, this could be a problem.

First generation Yubikeys can be reprogrammed without any authentication, DOS attack. Might be a problem if you are away from home. When you program is now it flashes the light and you have eight seconds to push the button to allow it to reprogram. Still might be flawed, user may push button to authenticate, but better then before.

Man in the middle attack. You log into the site the looks like the correct site, send you OTP, and the attacker can log into your account. Not a challenge response system.

Authentication server

Want an authentication server, uses postgresql as a database.

vkaserver, classic forking server.

Can pass username, and password to PAM.

Can generate one time pad of valid yubikeys for use with devices that don’t support USB keyboard interfaces. Dodgy.

Could write software for Nokia that does this inside the phone, however this carries other issues.

Use pam_ldap.so for authentication.

Draft proposal for Kerberos to use OTP went away. I would like to use OTP with Kerberos.

Questions

Valid attack. Steal key, record next 100 passwords, return key, and use the recorded passwords.

Now RFID version of the key.