Re: SCRAM with channel binding downgrade attack

On Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 04:54:45PM +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> I'm wondering if that means we should then also not do it specifically for
> scram in this version. Otherwise we're likely to end up with a parameter
> that only has a "lifetime" of one version, and that seems like a bad idea.
> If nothing else we should clearly think out what the path is to make sure
> that doesn't happen. (e.g. we don't want a
> scram_channel_binding_mode=require in this version, if the next one is
> going to replace it with something like heikkis suggested
> allowed_authentication_methods=SCRAM-SHA-256-PLUS or whatever we end up
> coming up with there).

Conceptually, it depends on if we consider SCRAM and
SCRAM+channel_binding as two separate authentication protocols. However
it seems to me that as both are the same thing as they use the same
protocol so it would be confusing for the user to be able to define both
SCRAM-SHA-256 and SCRAM-SHA-256-PLUS within the same list, so I would
tend to think that we should have in this future
"allowed_authentication_methods" only scram-sha-256 listed as an option,
which counts for both SCRAM with and without channel binding.

Thinking harder about this thread, it could be as well possible in the
future that we add support for channel binding for some other SASL
mechanism, in which case I would tend to rename
scram_channel_binding_type and scram_channel_binding_mode to simply
channel_binding_type and channel_binding_mode, without any concepts of
SCRAM attached to it. So in short, I'd like to keep both enforcement
mechanisms as separate concepts. One future compatibility issue is how
to deal with for example cases like allowed_authentication_methods="md5"
and channel_binding_mode=require where an allowed authentication does
not have channel binding? And it seems to me that this should result in
an error.

Opinions of others are welcome.
--
Michael