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  • Leslie Lamport Phil Karn Public Key Cryptography Laptop Computers SSH Two-Factor Authentication

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    S/KEY is a public key cryptography scheme developed in the late 1980s by Neil Haller, Phil Karn and John Walden at Bellcore. It uses one-time passwords generated from a shared secret key to authenticate users. However, S/KEY is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle and certain race condition attacks if used alone without an encrypted transport layer. Additionally, without including the salt or count in each iteration, an attacker could find collisions directly with complexity of 264 or pre-compute valid credentials for each user in an S/KEY database.

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    S/KEY is a public key cryptography scheme developed in the late 1980s by Neil Haller, Phil Karn and John Walden at Bellcore. It uses one-time passwords generated from a shared secret key to authenticate users. However, S/KEY is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle and certain race condition attacks if used alone without an encrypted transport layer. Additionally, without including the salt or count in each iteration, an attacker could find collisions directly with complexity of 264 or pre-compute valid credentials for each user in an S/KEY database.

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    7 views1 page

    Leslie Lamport Phil Karn Public Key Cryptography Laptop Computers SSH Two-Factor Authentication

    Uploaded by

    JJJ
    S/KEY is a public key cryptography scheme developed in the late 1980s by Neil Haller, Phil Karn and John Walden at Bellcore. It uses one-time passwords generated from a shared secret key to authenticate users. However, S/KEY is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle and certain race condition attacks if used alone without an encrypted transport layer. Additionally, without including the salt or count in each iteration, an attacker could find collisions directly with complexity of 264 or pre-compute valid credentials for each user in an S/KEY database.

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    S/KEY is also sometimes referred to as Lamport's scheme, after its author, Leslie
    Lamport. It was developed by Neil Haller, Phil Karn and John Walden at Bellcore in the
    late 1980s. With the expiration of the basic patents on public key cryptography and the
    widespread use of laptop computers running SSH and other cryptographic protocols that
    can secure an entire session, not just the password, S/KEY is falling into disuse. [citation
    needed]
    Schemes that implement two-factor authentication, by comparison, are growing in
    use.

    S/KEY is however vulnerable to a man in the middle attack if used by itself. It is also
    vulnerable to certain race conditions, such as where an attacker's software sniffs the
    network to learn the first N-1 characters in the password (where N equals the password
    length), establishes its own TCP session to the server, and in rapid succession tries all
    valid characters in the Nth position until one succeeds. These types of vulnerabilities can
    be avoided by using ssh, SSL, SPKM, or other encrypted transport layer.

    Since each iteration of S/KEY doesn't include the salt or count, it is feasible to find
    collisions directly without breaking the initial password. This has a complexity of 2 64,
    which can be pre-calculated with the same amount of space. The space complexity can
    be optimized by storing chains of values, although collisions might reduce the coverage
    of this method, especially for long chains.[2]

    Somebody with an S/KEY database in their hands can break all of them in parallel with a
    complexity of 264. While they wouldn't get the original password, they would be able to
    find valid credentials for each user. In this regard, it is similar to storing unsalted 64-bit
    hashes of strong, unique passwords.

    The S/KEY protocol can loop. If such a loop were created in the S/KEY chain, an attacker
    could use your key without finding the original value, and possibly without tipping off the
    valid user. The pathological case of this would be an OTP which hashes to itself

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