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There are authentication mechanisms that rely on passwords but work by not transmitting the password too. One example is kerberos. TOTP is a password. The fact

There are authentication mechanisms that rely on passwords but work by not transmitting the password too. One example is kerberos. TOTP is a password. The fact that it is a password doesn't matter though since it is something you have (and can't know) which augments the something you know. This satisfies the intent of MFA.

KMag 5y ago
> One example is kerberos. It kills me that most enterprise environments use Kerberos via Active Directory, LDAP, or NIS. So, your workstation probably has Kerberos tickets sitting on it, which would allow very light weight 2-way authentication and encryption of internal flows. TLS client certificates and TLS-everywhere would be another good option, but it's particularly frustrating that the Kerberos TGTs are already on the client machines. The key management part is already solved in the Kerberos case. Kerberos is even potentially resistant to quantum cracking. (Grover's quantum search algorithm effectively halves the key size of ideal symmetric ciphers, so you'd want 256-bit keys.) Forward secrecy is an issue, but there are proposals to incorporate DH key exchange in the pre-auth to give imperfect forward secrecy. A post-quantum key agreement protocol, like RLWE would be fairly strait forward to incorporate, with standardization being the main hurdle.
- toyg 5y ago
  I agree Kerberos is somewhat under-used, but man isn't it half a pain to set up integrations with... Part of the problem is that it's "enterprise" tech, which means all sorts of "enterprise" middleware claims to support it with some half-assed concoction that worked on the presales demo environment once, back in 2001, and nobody else has touched since. And it's also old and pretty obscure, with documentation lost to the fog of time, and very few people who remember how it was supposed to work - a bit like MS DCOM...

KMag 5y ago

> One example is kerberos. It kills me that most enterprise environments use Kerberos via Active Directory, LDAP, or NIS. So, your workstation probably has Kerberos tickets sitting on it, which would allow very light weight 2-way authentication and encryption of internal flows. TLS client certificates and TLS-everywhere would be another good option, but it's particularly frustrating that the Kerberos TGTs are already on the client machines. The key management part is already solved in the Kerberos case. Kerberos is even potentially resistant to quantum cracking. (Grover's quantum search algorithm effectively halves the key size of ideal symmetric ciphers, so you'd want 256-bit keys.) Forward secrecy is an issue, but there are proposals to incorporate DH key exchange in the pre-auth to give imperfect forward secrecy. A post-quantum key agreement protocol, like RLWE would be fairly strait forward to incorporate, with standardization being the main hurdle.

toyg 5y ago
I agree Kerberos is somewhat under-used, but man isn't it half a pain to set up integrations with... Part of the problem is that it's "enterprise" tech, which means all sorts of "enterprise" middleware claims to support it with some half-assed concoction that worked on the presales demo environment once, back in 2001, and nobody else has touched since. And it's also old and pretty obscure, with documentation lost to the fog of time, and very few people who remember how it was supposed to work - a bit like MS DCOM...