Category Archives: security

On Password Hashing and RFC 6070

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The RFC Editor has announced a new document, RFC 6070, with test vectors for PKCS5 PBKDF2. The document grow out of my implementation of SCRAM for GNU SASL. During interop testing, more than one other implementation turned out to have mistakes in the PBKDF2 implementation. It didn’t help that there weren’t any stable test vectors for PBKDF2, so that we could do black-box testing of our PBKDF2 implementations against well-known and stable test vectors. Debugging this was time consuming. The document addresses this problem.

So what is PBKDF2?
Continue reading On Password Hashing and RFC 6070→

GNU SASL with SCRAM-SHA-1-PLUS

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I have finished the SCRAM implementation in GNU SASL. The remaining feature to be added were support for the “enhanced” SCRAM-SHA-1-PLUS variant instead of just the normal SCRAM-SHA-1 mechanism. The difference is that the latter supports channel bindings to TLS, which makes it possible to detect man-in-the-middle attacks even if TLS is not used with server authentication. In GnuTLS we recently added an API for applications to extract channel bindings, which you will need to use in order to use SCRAM-SHA-1-PLUS. I announced the experimental version 1.5.4 release together with a writeup on how to test it. With this, our support for SCRAM should be complete.

GS2-KRB5 using GNU SASL and MIT Kerberos for Windows

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I have blogged about GNU SASL and GS2-KRB5 with the native Kerberos on Mac OS X before, so the next logical step has been to support GS2-KRB5 on Windows through MIT Kerberos for Windows (KfW). With the latest release of GNU SASL 1.5.2 I have added support for the KfW GSS-API library. There were several issues in completing this due to problems with KfW, but I won’t bore you with those details.

What is important is to demonstrate how GNU SASL can now talk IMAP authenticated with GS2-KRB5 using KfW on native Windows. Continue reading GS2-KRB5 using GNU SASL and MIT Kerberos for Windows→

GS2-KRB5 in GNU SASL 1.5.0

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I have worked in the IETF on the specification for the next generation GSSAPI-to-SASL bridge called GS2 (see my status page for background) for a couple of years now. The specification is (finally!) in the RFC editor’s queue, and is supposed to be stable and final although we are still tuning some details. The next step is to implement the protocol and do interop testing. A couple of months of implementation and testing work culminated in tonight’s release of GNU SASL 1.5.0 (see announcement here). Or should I say that the work can now begin…
Continue reading GS2-KRB5 in GNU SASL 1.5.0→