From owner-freebsd-security Sat Jan 13 23:47:14 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from isr5429.urh.uiuc.edu (isr5429.urh.uiuc.edu [130.126.209.169]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 73B5337B69B for ; Sat, 13 Jan 2001 23:46:56 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 41504 invoked by uid 1000); 14 Jan 2001 07:46:57 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 14 Jan 2001 07:46:57 -0000 Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 01:46:57 -0600 (CST) From: Frank Tobin X-X-Sender: To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Crist J. Clark, at 16:50 -0800 on Sat, 13 Jan 2001, wrote: I am not sure I understand your argument here. I your system, how does the _user_ authenticate himself? Biometrics? HW token? Smart card? Really, no passwords? Public-key authentications exist in such implementations such as ssh RSA authentication. In general, they involve the user signing or decrypting certain data. Peter Chiu is correct in stating that there is a central point of vulnerability when it comes to using public key authentication. Of course, the user is under no obligation to use the same keypair for all systems used. Also, the decision of how many sites the user uses a particular keypair for, and whether or not to encrypt the keypair locally is entirely up to the user (a good thing). One key idea is to leave the strength of the security as much up to the user as possible. With passwords, however, the user has to worry about both ends being compromoised (his end, and the server's end); if the server is compromised, and his password gotten, this might be used against him other places. With public-key authentication, he only has to worry about his end; if the server's end is compromised, the user's security is compromised little. -- Frank Tobin http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message