# Tag Info

12

SRP needs more than a group, it requires a field. See the specification: second user sends $B = v + g^b$. This requires two operations, addition and multiplication. You cannot trivially slap that onto a group which provides only one operation, such as elliptic curves. Variants of SRP which use elliptic curves have been proposed, but do not seem to have ...

11

If k is a constant, such as 3, it becomes possible to select a pair (N,g) such that the discrete log of k to the base g is known, which would enable the two-for-one guessing attack again.

9

Oh, and while you did not specifically ask about this, there is another point I believe that is important to highlight; DH and SRP are different protocols, and have different requirements on the generator they use. In particular, taking a generator that is designed to be used securely within DH can void the security properties of SRP. Here's what's going ...

9

Well, yes, that is generally good advice about DH. Here is some background on this: support you were given a value $g^x \bmod p$, and you were also told that $1 \le x \le A$ for some value $A$. If so, then there are several known attacks (such as Big Step/Little Step and Pollard's Rho) that can recover $x$ in about $\sqrt A$ steps. If we have as our ...

7

The security goal behind SRP is that an attacker that could either pretend to be a client (and attempt to log into a server that knows the key), pretend to be a server (and allow clients that know the key to attempt to log in), or actively monitor (and modify) the communications between a valid client and a valid server, would learn nothing from an exchange, ...

6

The SRP paper has this point in its list of security properties:   6. If the user's password itself is compromised, it should not allow the intruder to determine the session key K for past sessions and decrypt them. Even present sessions should at least be protected from passive eavesdropping. The following section is titled Reduction to ...

5

In SRP, v = g^x means $v = g^x \mod p$, i.e. exponentiation modulo a large prime $p$.

5

No, since finding $a$ allows offline checking of passwords. $\:$ No, although I can't back this part up.

5

One of the design goals of SRP is that it should be a zero-knowledge authentication protocol. This is to say, even the legitimate server should not be able to learn anything about the user's password (other than what it could learn using a generic brute force attack on the verifier). SRP also assumes that the user may not be able to remember anything ...

4

Solving a 256-bit discrete log is absolutely doable, and quite quickly, these days; there are public tools that can do it, though they may require some expertise to use. On that note, even a 1024-bit modulus is not particularly conservative: it is generally agreed that well-funded organizations today could break logs of that size as well, but at a very ...

4

When using a Discrete Logarithm based scheme, such as SRP, the rule of thumb is to always use private exponents with a bit length twice the desired security strength. Hence, a 128 bit exponent $a$ will at most give you 64 bits of security. If you want 128 bit security, you need (at least) a 256 bit exponent. This is because the algebraic structure of the ...

4

From the RFC: SRP also supplies a shared secret at the end of the authentication sequence that can be used to generate encryption keys. It seems from my quick look over the RFC that that shared secret is the premaster secret, so you are correct.

4

Yes, you can and use a slow hashing function when constructing the verifier. I would recommend using PBKDF2, as it is designed for this purpose. In fact, Wikipedia says: $v$ is the host's password verifier, $v = g^x$, $x = H(s,p)$. Using of functions like PBKDF2 instead of $H$ for password hashing is highly recommended. Thus, you could use ...

3

When I learned about SRP we were told it wasn't seeing much deployment due to possibly infringing on EKE patents. Network Computing had this to say in 2002: Standards groups have made several attempts to induce Lucent to talk about its EKE patent -- to no avail. Even with Lucent's silence on the topic, few vendors have been willing to use SRP. To further ...

2

The point of SRP is to remove the need for the SSL/TLS certificates. With SRP integrated into SSL/TLS (as per RFC 5054), you get mutual client/server password-based authentication and can do without any of the dreadful certificate business; and yet the protocol is still resilient to offline dictionary attacks. If your SSL/TLS still uses a server certificate ...

2

It seems like a better solution would be to have the server that is providing the Javascript file, also provide a random seed. The Javascript can then use that random seed (and anything other maybe-random bits it can scrounge up, such as the output from Math.random()) to see a cryptographic PRNG, and then use the output of that crypto-PRNG for generating s, ...

2

The purpose is to prevent a two-for-one guessing attack, where an active adversary, impersonating the server, can test two password guesses per attempt. The attack and why the multiplier prevents it is described in Section 2 of the SRP-6 paper (ps). (According to MacKenzie, it was discovered by Bleichenbacher.) In brief, the attack goes like this: Instead ...

2

Being able to solve the discrete logarithm in SRP-6 allows an eavesdropping attacker to dictionary attack the password. It will not directly reveal a strong password or its hash. It requires the attacker to observe a successful authentication, $B$ alone does not suffice. The attacker eavesdrops $s$, $A = g^a$, $B$ and $M_1$. The attacker solves $a$ from ...

2

"Would it be possible for an attacker to launch an offline dictionary/brute-force attack on the B public key: ..." That is possible if and only if the attacker can distinguish b's distribution from the uniform distribution on {0,1,2,3,...,N-3,N-2}. $\:$ If so, an attacker could compute verifiers v for candidate passwords, subtract kv from B mod N, and ...

2

SRP with the user's key = 0 is identical to DH. SRP with a publicly known key is identical to DH with a constant multiplier. For private key $x$, user ephemeral value $a$, server ephemeral value $b$, and $u$ derived from shared values, SRP ends up calculating the value $g^{ab + uxa}$ (which is then typically hashed to get the shared key). If $x$ is zero, ...

2

Yes, it's okay. This is actually mentioned in passing in the SRP 6 design paper. Previous versions used a random $u$ where an attacker who saw (or could predict) it before revealing $A$ could compute $A = g^a v^{-u}$ and use this to effectively cancel out the long term secret. With $u$ derived from a hash, even if the attacker saw $B$, the dependence of $u$ ...

1

SRP protocol is quite abstract so to provide matching implementation for version 6a you need to know following: N, g - group parameters H - hash function, there can be different hash functions used for different values how is private key x calculated how is shared session key K calculated how are evidence messages (M1, M2) calculated In addition you need ...

1

The multiplier parameter $k$ is different between SRP 6 and 6a. You can see that RFC 5054 calculates it using a hash of the domain parameters (modulus $N$ and generator $g$), so it is using SRP 6a, as opposed to SRP 6 where $k$ is constant. Likewise, in section 6.2.1 of IEC 11770-4 – the October 2005 draft at least – the equivalent value $c$ is defined as a ...

1

There is an explicit RCF 5054 which uses SRP to negotiate a shared key for a TLS connection. There are also hooks for OpenSSL to be able to use SRP to setup an SSL connection without using certificates using the SRP generated shared session key.

1

It depends on the context, but later in this paper, the author makes it clear that he is using it to mean exponentiation: The one-way'' verifier-generator P() becomes a modular exponentiation in GF(n): P(x) = g^x

1

Look at where $a$ is used in the protocol: The user calculates the public $A = g^a$ using it. The user computes the session key as $K = H(S)$, with $S = (B - kg^x) ^ {a + ux}$. An attacker should never find out $S$, because even if the session key $K$ leaks due to e.g. a flawed encryption algorithm, she would only know the hashed value. So knowing or ...

1

You can pre-compute and hardcode N and g into your client and server. There's no harm in doing this. I do not believe that using per-user N will provide any additional security. It is common practice to define SRP parameters for a particular application or (larger) protocol, see e.g. RFC 5054.

1

Short: SRP. For encrypted key exchange you need to add key confirmation to get challenge-response authentication. These all are password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) mechanisms. These mechanisms end-up into peers sharing an agreed key, which is only the same if the password agreement was successful. Challenge-response authentication is usually ...

1

PBKDF2 can produce output of arbitrary length. With HMAC/SHA-512 it does so in 512-bit chunks, but it is not restricted to 512 bits. If you need more bits then you can have more. If you want to use the same password for authentication and for encryption, then the proper way is to "isolate" them from each other. I suggest the following: for the user password ...

1

Suppose the server did not include $v$ in the computation of $B$. In such case the following events have happened: The server has sent a salt value $s$ to the client. We might assume it is authentic (because it is easy for the fake server to get it from the real server). The client re-calculates its long term private key $x$ such that $v = g^x$. The client ...

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