On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
In fact TLS + HTTP Basic Auth is pretty interoperable, secure against quite a
few attacks, and widely deployed.
But mostly ignored, because the user interface is dreadful. Practically
all websites use one of the ad-hoc mechanisms that Russ referred to.
The requirements needed to be "satisfactory" depend very much on your
viewpoint; last week I talked to the guy who implemented Freenigma (PGP for
web mailers, http://www.freenigma.com), and he commented that "this will never
get past the security gurus in the IETF because it's so simple, people might
actually use it".
That says something frightening about the kind of impression we give to people
who work on making usable security. "Usable" needs to be an important
component of "satisfactory".
(He's quite aware of the obvious security defects of his scheme, btw. It's a
tradeoff.)
http://www.links.org/?p=130
Over the last year we've moved all our email users over to secure
authentication (with TLS and SASL, or the old passowrd authentication
alternatives) and the main usability problem is not the protocols as
specified. The implementations fail to use the negotiation features to
work securely when possible, and instead baffle users with terrible user
interfaces bristling with options.
Tony.
--
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FISHER: WEST OR NORTHWEST 4 OR 5 BECOMING VARIABLE 3 OR 4. FAIR. MODERATE OR
GOOD.
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