Dos and Don'ts of Client Authentication on the Web

{LANG_NAVORIGIN} Authentication
By: Kevin Fu, Emil Sit, Kendra Smith, Nick Feamster, 02/26/2005

8 Conclusion

To provide designers and implementers with a clear framework, we have given a description of the limitations, requirements, and security models specific to Web client authentication. We presented a set of hints on how to design a secure client authentication scheme, based on experience gained from our informal survey of commercial schemes. The survey showed that many sites are not secure against the interrogative adversary. We proposed an authentication scheme secure against the interrogative adversary.

Web sites have such a large range of requirements that no one authentication scheme can meet them all. Currently SSL remains too costly and client authentication infrastructures remain hardly deployed. This partially explains why so many home-brew schemes exist. The Web community ought to recommend a secure standard or secure practices if there is any hope to eliminate the proliferation of insecure home-brew authentication schemes. We hope that this paper will help schemes in resisting common attacks.

For more information and our source code, download our technical report [18] or visit our Web site at http://cookies.lcs.mit.edu/.

9 Acknowledgments

We thank David Andersen, Ian Anderson, Jeffrey W. Baker, Richard Barbalace, Andrew M. Boardman, Benjie Chen, David Dittrich, Paul Hill, Frans Kaashoek, David Mazières, Robert T. Morris, Steve Morris, Joon Park, Matt Power, Ron Rivest, Jerry Saltzer, Richard Smith, Win Treese, the anonymous reviewers, and the members of the PDOS group at MIT. We also thank the companies who talked with us about the security of their Web sites: FatBrain.com, WSJ.com, and yahoo.com. The students of the MIT Applied Security Reading Group (http://pdos.lcs.mit.edu/asrg/) deserve credit for the genesis of this project. Finally, we thank Duncan Hines for manufacturing the materials necessary to sustain our efforts.

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Footnotes

This research was supported by a USENIX scholars fellowship.

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