GSSAPI

[Karl O. Pinc]

On 07/17/2014 08:33:17 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 9:01 PM, Coy Hile <coy.hile at coyhile.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Jul 17, 2014, at 7:59 PM, Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org> wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 17 Jul 2014, Douglas E Engert wrote:
> >>
> >>> I too am personally baffled why OpenSSH does not include the
> patch.
> >>
> >> We don't trust the attack surface the Kerberos/GSSAPI provides.
> >
> > What’s your justification for that?  I don’t see a larger attack
> surface in a kerberized environment compared to the wild west.

> Especially compared to the "oh, let me just leave my SSH private keys
> without passphrases so I don't have to unlock them" practice that is
> the commonplace in every environment I've dealt with since 1996, when
> I first tried to compile ssh-1. This is re-inforced by the default
> acceptance of ssh-keygen of passphrase keys, and *every environment*
> I've ever audited has at least 20% passphrase free SSH private keys.
> Often it approaches 90%. The technology of OpenSSH is pretty robust,
> but the commonplace practices are often utterly, utterly horrid.
> Educating user communities is too often seen as "not on task", and
> "not part of the priorities", especially because it's often the CTO
> and architects at a company who are most likely to ignore basic
> security practices as a matter of policy.
> 
> The Kerberos tokens are a tremendous win over this, for robust
> single-sign-on, for the ability to invalidate or reject keys at a
> central access point, and for their ease of integration with SSL and
> other technologies.

FWIW, an alternative approach with similar benefits is to
use hardware tokens such as yubikeys.  This has some
advantages when it comes to the social aspects involved in
fixing poor security practices.  The hardware cost is low enough 
that the risk/reward ratio can be good, especially as -- as
noted above -- dealing with people is often the hardest part.



Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein