Hello Vadim!

On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 21:28, Vadim Fedukovich wrote:
> Dear Chris,
> 
> authentication methods and protocols were researched for years.
> 
> The method described is an easy one and probably could be implemented fast.
> However, one better start from requirements before any coding.
> For example: server is not authenticated here so man-in-the-middle
> is allowed by design

Firstly, thanks for your reply! :-)

The public key will be verified against a root CA. The public keys used
are all issued by a health organisation that is part of the federal
government of Australia.

I'm a final-year software engineering student, so I can totally
understand and agree with your statement regarding man-in-the-middle
attacks and starting with requirements(the person-in-the-middle is named
Trudy according to Andy S Tanenbaum). 

My reason behind selecting this authentication method is that the user
will already have needed to enter two passwords - one to access their
cryptography store (I have no choice here - the API used to access the
authentication tokens is provided by the government body in question)
and another to access the private keys on their token (for signing and
decryption). Avoiding a third password actually makes sense in this
case, as many of the target audience would have a tendancy to have very
similar (if not identical) passwords across all domains.

I'm doing some tinkering at this point. I can't use the provided API on
my chosen server platform (Linux) or any other platform as it relies on
the excellent SQLite which uses database-level locking. As the server
software is required to service 100s of concurrent sessions, the very
coarse-grained locking (and thus low concurrency is inappropriate).

After I am done with this project, I intend to contribute to the OpenSSL
documentation, so any help that anyone gives me will not be wasted on my
small brain. :-)

Regards,

Chris
> 
> regards,
> Vadim
> 
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 06:48:26PM +1100, Chris Nolan wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I'm working on building a client-server setup for an application
> > involving Smartcards. I have a library for Smartcard access on the
> > Windows side and was hoping to do the following for authentication:
> > 
> > 1. Using a certificate that contains the client's public encryption key,
> > send a PKCS7 message to the client.
> > 2. Get the client to send me a hash of the decrypted content.
> > 
> > The problem is, wrapping my head around what to call and in what order
> > on the server side. The man pages are good, but don't really give me
> > much insight as to the structure of the API.
> > 
> > Can anyone point me in the direction of some examples on how to do this?
> > The reason I want to use PKCS7 is because the library on the client side
> > is already setup to do this with a single C function call.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > Chris
> > 
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