Em Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 08:41:40AM -0500, Nicolas Williams escreveu:
> NIS is public. Kerberos is not. With NIS you just query the NIS servers
> and you've got the hashes to work with. With Kerberos you must sniff the
> wire to gather ciphertext for cryptanalysis.

One of the premises of kerberos was to make sniffing useless. It's not
useless anymore.
Also, I can also just query the kerberos server just like NIS if
preauthentication is not in place.

> In the real world today most LANs are switched and corporate WANs tend
> to be encrypted. This makes it rather difficult to snoop on the wires.

Not anymore, with tools such as dsniff and arpspoof it's really simple.
They even have autoconf and nice manpages :)

> Also, Kerberos is extensible with respect to pre-authentication. It is

This is very nice, and one of the solutions pointed out in the paper.

> possible, and has been done and discussed plenty, to design and
> implement pre-auth types that mitigate for weak passwords. You can't say
> the same for NIS. Some such pre-auth types involve one-time passwords,
> others involve smartcards, others involve mixing users' keys with their
> client hosts' keys for pre-auth, yet other pre-auth types involve SRP,
> Diffie-Hellman exchanges, etc...

Of curse NIS doesn't support this and never will. The comparison doesn't go
that far. But the preauth most of us have right now is with timestamps, 
I guess. Which can be attacked in the same way, it's a known structure
inside the packet and encrypted with the user's password.

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