On Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 11:03:19AM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 28 Oct 2000, Rich Salz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > If you just embed arcfour, what's your key management plan?
> 
> key = MD4(salt, user, password, possibly other stuff)
> 
> The salt is sent on each new connection; at the moment it's somewhat
> predictable but should never repeat.  The password is known to both
> the server and client, but never sent in the clear.
> 
> So the key should never be reused, but we avoid having a key-exchange
> mechanism.

If I may I'd like to suggest an alternative: use Diffie-Hellmann for the
key exchange and use the DH key as the symmetric encryption key. This
gives you anonymous encrypted sessions. Add an authentication feature
(basic, GSS-API, SASL, whatever) and you have authenticated encrypted
sessions.

See the current discussion on SSHv2 and GSS-API/Kerberos on the
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] lists. The latter has an
archive:

http://www.mit.edu:8008/menelaus.mit.edu/kerberos/

My guess is that if the SSHv2 spec issues are cleared up then SSHv2 is
the best possibility for rsync. I don't mean using SSH with rsync as is
done now, but rather to use SSH as a library within rsync instead of as
an external program.

> -- 
> Martin Pool, Linuxcare, Inc.
> +61 2 6262 8990
> [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.linuxcare.com/
> Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.


Nico
--


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