Marek Kowal wrote:

> Whaw. I never expected to start such a discussion on this list. And almost
> completely OFF-topic, I must admit.
>
> Guys, I did not ask question: do you think that MS is right not to publish
> RFC for NTLM. In fact, I do not care. What I care,  are customers of our
> POP3/WebMail service - and their exact number has SEVEN digits - who mostly
> use OutlookExpress or Outlook and who connect to our mailboxes. I hoped my
> question was clear, but I'll rewrite it a bit:
>
> What authorization method can I implement on my servers (installing Exchange
> or any Win2k service is out of question), which will allow us to securely
> authenticate our users and which will not use SSL? SSL is quite "expensive",
> we would have to significantly increase our hardware base. And anyway, I am
> not interested in encrypting mail contents - I just want to keep passwords
> secure.
>
> Still, I've read all that discussions and attacks (mostly on Larry, as if
> his name was Larry Gates, not Larry Osterman) and managed to find two clues:
> one is SPNEGO and the other DIGEST. So I have four questions (and I mean to
> get answers on them, not the philosophical points of view, please):
> 1) which OE clients do support it? Does OE5.0 do? Or only OE6.0, which - at
> that point - is not really wide spread?

Can somebody answer this question?

> 2) Can somebody point me to any resources on SPNEGO/DIGEST? I know, 45 secs.
> on MSDN would do, but I believe experts on this list will know much better
> what is really worth reading.

GSSAPI SPENEGO: RFC 2222 or even better draft-ietf-cat-sasl-gssapi-05.txt, as
the former is underspecified.

DIGEST-MD5: RFC 2831.

> 3) Is anybody implementing (has already implemented) any of those in Unix
> world. Can it be done outside Windows platform, or the RFC will not be
> published and this is again some proprietary thing?

RFCs exist, there are multiple implementations on different platforms. In
particular the one from CMU.

> 4) What POP3 CAPA (or IMAP4 CAPABILITY) AUTH=XXX response should be
> presented to client, so that it starts negotiating DIGEST? AUTH=DIGEST? This
> would allow me quickly to check, which clients will try to negotiate it,
> event without actually implementing it.

DIGEST-MD5 as per RFC 2831.

> There is also another one, this might be more to your liking: is
> SPNEGO/DIGEST really good/secure? Why is it better/worse than CRAM-MD5?

CRAM-MD5 doesn't do mutual authentication, also it doesn't protect from reply
attacks. For more information see the RFCs above.

> Frankly, I'd love to have first four questions answered before we start
> discussion on that one.

Should we move this discussion to SASL mailing list?

Alexey Melnikov
__________________________________________
R & D, ACI Worldwide/MessagingDirect
Richmond, Surrey, UK
Phone: +44 20 8332 4508

I speak for myself only, not for my employer.
__________________________________________


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