6 Nov 2002 Bram   » (Master)

single sign-on protocol

Raph mentioned that we discussed single sign-on protocols, and I came up with some good ideas. I'll summarize now.

There is a single monolithic site which users maintain their login information and identity on. This is very convenient from an end user perspective, since they only have to remember one password and maintain their information in one place. It's also very appealing for web sites, since they no longer have to manage any login information or do tech support for lost passwords and the like.

Say the site which does the signon is signon.com and the site using those logins is blog.com. When a user is doing something which may require login to blog.com, they'll get a hyperlink saying 'log in', which will link to signon.com. When the user clicks on that, they'll either be prompted to set up an account on signon.com, or if they already have one and have an active session, they'll get redirected back to blog.com, where they're now logged in.

That's the end user experience, now for the technical details.

blog.com makes an http or https query in advance to get a bunch of challenge/response pairs, which are generated dynamically by signon.com. A huge number of these can be stockpiled, so the query only has to be done rarely, the only real restriction on their use is that they can only be used once each. The login hyperlink goes to (or redirects to) a url on signon.com, and includes a challenge code and callback url as GET parameters. For example, it might be http://signon.com/signon?challenge=a63f34b34d&callback=http://blog.com/login.cgi signon.com then gets the users login from their cookie, verifies their identity (either by an active session cookie or making them type in their password again) and redirects back to the callback, giving it GET parameters of the user's login identity and sha1(login + response). For example, it might be http://blog.com/login.cgi?user=bram&verify=ssonuoocrdua blog.com can then easily check that verify is the correct value, and give the user a session cookie if so.

Raph suggested that for developer convenience it should be possible to send signon.com a nonce url which gets echoed back. I think this is more cleanly implemented by making signon.com notice if there are already GET parameters in the callback url, and preserving them if so. There is a special place in hell for whoever decided that the first GET parameter should have a different delimiter than the rest of them.

signon.com can avoid having to store all challenge/response pairs by keeping a secret symmetric key and generating challenges at random and setting responses to be the encryption of the challenge.

I'm very happy with this protocol. It's easy to implement on all sides, and has a smooth implementation path - web sites are immediately motivated to use it because it removes the burden of account management from them. Also, blog.com has complete control over whether all requests are done by http or https, allowing them to determine their level of security pragmatically and migrate over time. signon.com doesn't even have to configure anything new to support new sites - it's simply left running. Best of all, sites using signon.com can't compromise each other no matter how insecure they are.

The main problem with this whole scheme, of course, is that it's centralized, has a single point of failure, and generally isn't very cypherpunkly. That's explicitly the model Raph asked for, out of overwhelming engineering expediency, and I agree with that sentiment - this solution is far from perfect, but it's easy, and noone's demonstrated that decentralized single signon is workable.

Bohemia

Bohemia's board size problem can be fixed with an interesting version of the swap rule - one player decides the board size, and the other decides whether they want to be the square or the bohemian. Handicaps can be given with a spread on the board size. It's possible that an even chances board size is overly large or small, experimentation is necessary.

One dimensional Bohemia is possible as well, by having the square go for arithmetic progressions. This can be done with any number of colors and length of arithmetic progression. The small van der Waerden numbers indicate that length three and two or three colors might be a bit small, but more is probably very interesting. This has the distinction of being one of the few games on a one dimensional board which isn't completely lame.

Debian

BitTorrent (which had a new release today) has the necessary files to make debs, but isn't in debian. If any debian maintainer would like to volunteer, I'd very much appreciate it. Maintenance should be easy - the dependencies are straightforward and it's written in pure Python.

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