Re: New work for sacred working group?

[pgut001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Gutmann)]

Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

>As I read it, that works by basically appending a (hashed?) password to a D-H
>derived key (with some length fields) and using the resulting value as the
>TLS pre-master key. Presumably the handshake falls over at the finished
>message if the wrong password was used.

Yup.  Or you can use RSA (without the heavyweight DH on the client-side), or
just a plain shared key.

>I'll have to read that I-D again and think about whether it really is better
>than the current sacred scheme

Well, I don't know about technically better, but it does more or less the same
job, it's unencumbered, and it's tuneable for low-powered devices.  It's most
importantly property however is that it's a TLS standards-track mechanism,
which means that it actually exists (i.e. it's implemented and eventually,
it's hoped, widely deployed).

Peter.