Projects/FAST

This is an early stage project for MIT Kerberos. It is being fleshed out by its proponents. Feel free to help flesh out the details of this project. After the project is ready, it will be presented for review and approval.

FAST is a pre-authentication framework for Kerberos. It includes a mechanism for tunneling pre-authentication exchanges using armoured KDC messages. FAST provides increased resistance to passive password guessing attacks.

Functional requirements

• Support for FAST in the AS and TGS in clients and KDCs
• Support for armor tickets obtained from host TGTs sufficient for pam_krb5 to use FAST.
• Support for PA-FX-COOKIE
• Support for Encrypted Challenge
• Support for ad-fx-fast-armor in the TGS
• Support for FAST factors in the existing plugin interface
• Support for KRB_FX_CF2

Plugin interface

The plugin interface needs to be suitable to be a public API. It seems like small extensions to retrieve the armor key and possibly a few other things to the existing pre-authentication plugin interface would be sufficient.

The big question is how should fast factors that are not pre-auth methods be handled. There are two approaches. First, define a new version of the function table so that old libraries will not recognize them. Alternatively treat them as normal pre-authentication methods and require that they fail (in a manner that causes them to be ignored) if they are called and the implementation does not support armor.

Design

This project or section is a stub and needs additional work before this project can be considered.

This design would need to cover the following elements:

How are host tickets obtained? Do we just use anonymous pkinit all the time or do we cache host tickets to use? If so, how is privilege separation handled?

External Dependencies

The FAST proposal has not yet been approved by the IETF.