Ask Slashdot: Open Hardware/Software-Based Security Token? 113
Qbertino (265505) writes I've been musing about a security setup to allow my coworkers/users access to files from the outside. I want security to be a little safer than pure key- or password-based SSH access, and some super-expensive RSA Token setup is out of question. I've been wondering whether there are any feasible and working FOSS and open hardware-based security token generator projects out there. It'd be best with ready-made server-side scripts/daemons. Perhaps something Arduino or Raspberry Pi based? Has anybody tried something like this? What are your experiences? What do you use? How would you attempt an open hardware FOSS solution to this problem?
yubikey (Score:3, Informative)
www.yubico.com ... not quite FOSS but its your ticket....
use SMS (Score:4, Informative)
You can set up 2nd factor using SMS pretty easily, and have it text you a second password that's good for five minutes.
Definitely the cheapest option.
If you make your own token with an arduino and an LCD and a real time clock and a battery you've already paid for the RSA tokens.
=Rich
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The point of 2-factor auth is someone (like a criminal) can have one factor in their possession without it being any good. So with the SMS just being a form of "what you have" (it goes to your cell phone, and in theory only yours, and is time-limited to prevent re-use), an outside attacker would still have to gain the "what you know" or "what you are" factor (either your password/passcode or biometrics of some sort).
True, I wouldn't use SMS for highly classified document protection, but for most things SMS
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Ugh, you people are so stupid... neither of you work in the wireless industry.
1) SMS can be intercepted, hacked, etc : false. White it's certainly possible for someone working at the wireless company to send fake SMS messages directly from the MSC, they can't see them, and if they can't see them, neither can a malicious entity. The only way you see a SMS message in transit is if you are participating in a MITM attack against the device, in which you would be emulating the wireless carrier at the time of the message's transmission.
Ever heard of "Malicious Number Porting"? Who needs to intercept SMS when your telco will do it for you?
SMS provides poor security...
GrpA
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Ever heard of "Malicious Number Porting"? Who needs to intercept SMS when your telco will do it for you?
SMS provides poor security...
GrpA
At which point, none of your phone calls or SMS come thru, so you know that the device is compromised. And the attacker STILL needs the first-factor to pair with the SMS, and to have a way to trigger the security key SMS to come thru during the brief window between when the port happens and before it is noticed.
If anyone is that dedicated to hacking you, then they're going to get your data no matter what. (And if your data really REALLY is that valuable, then you'll be protecting it with something a hell
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It's not absolutely safe (is anything), but it meets the criterion of being a little safer than password/key alone.
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Before anybody jumps on me: I wrote "something like". No, it's not open source. But using iCloud or Azure are proprietary solutions too!
I don't "trust" BitTorrent Sync's security. But odds are it's fine for this kind of use. You can also control access to files by simply putting them in different folders, and giving different people access to them, or give out temporary authorizati
Re: use SMS (Score:2)
I use BtSync for syncing a collection of files between my desktop, laptop, and mobile phone. It only syncs on my own network (because that's what I want -- I have ssh if I need into my files remotely).
In terms of general usefulness, it certainly works well. The security in terms of public facing networks appears to be decent. I don't know.
I've heard of people using it with a remote instance of ownCloud to provide a simple iCloud-like solution.
Re: use SMS (Score:2)
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We use custom scripts, that work very well. They're not very complex. We're SMSing through a third-party provider, which is not my first choice, but it is easy to manage.
This is not, of course, extremely secure, but with all the SMS management credentials kept completely separate, it's pretty good.
It gives us the 'something you have' and 'something you know' requirements. You need the phone. In a very well planned and determined attack they could probably get past this, but there are other measures in place
Yubikey is the way to go... (Score:5, Informative)
Yubikey is a USB OTP generator, it can be integrated quite easily and it has ssh and a little fast dig up I found this link about yubikey and openvpn..
http://www.yubico.com/applicat... [yubico.com]
http://forum.yubico.com/viewto... [yubico.com]
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The submitter asked:
"I've been wondering whether there are any feasible and working FOSS and open hardware-based security token generator projects out there"
Is Yubikey open source software and hardware? Because it appears to be neither.
RSA was in the NSA's back pocket. Why wouldn't these people? How can their hardware or software be audited?
OATH (Score:5, Informative)
My organization uses 2FA with a standard that's compatible with Google Authenticator and a Yubikey (OATH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org] and http://www.nongnu.org/oath-too... [nongnu.org]). People with smartphones could use Google Authenticator to obtain auth tokens; an inexpensive ($25 per person) yubikey provides a very easy way to enter tokens without much hassle; and the open-source oathtool can generate tokens for other uses (i.e. add a "paper" authentication device with a long list of sequential tokens).
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I'm using OATH/TKIP as well for my remote access as a backup if I can't SSH in via my private RSA key:
1: It is brain-deadly easy to implement. I use CentOS, so I can fetch the Google Authenticator code from EPEL.
2: Many different OTP apps out there. There is Google's. Amazon has one for AWS. There are a number of third party ones. All are interchangeable. At a desktop computer, I just plug the Yubikey in a USB slot, mash the button when the password is asked. Done.
3: The protocol is decently secur
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Move your keys off your hardware (Score:2)
SSH keys on read only SD Card?
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The certs on the card would be the thing you have, the passkey to decrypt the certs on the card would be the thing you know.
Waiting for (Score:2)
Google Authenticator for software tokens (Score:5, Informative)
For software tokens, Google Authenticator has apps for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry. They implement the TOTP standard, so any compatible code-generating software (such as the J2ME app I have on my non-smartphone) will work with it.
They also have a PAM module [google.com] that works with SSH (or anything else that uses PAM). I've used it before, and it works great.
For reference, neither the apps nor the PAM module depend in any way on Google services, they don't send any data to Google, and will work perfectly happily in a totally offline environment (assuming all the servers and client apps have synchronized clocks).
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This.
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Why so? Not doubting you, just wondering your reasoning...
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Funny how the link is a Google link. Even when you try to avoid Google, you still have to do it through Google.
Yubikeys (Score:1)
A secnod for Yubikeys. We love them. You can load your own key onto them so there is no worries when a third party (like RSA) gets hacked. There are open souce tools to configure them and run authentication servers. Integrated with PAM, and can be used with radius servers. And they are about $25 each, with no expiry date.
Google Authenticator (Score:2)
I'd include links - but there are a lot of them depending on what you want (Linux, PAM, Apache, Andoird, iOS, etc) - So, "Just Google it!"
OTP is where it's at. (Score:1)
FreeOTP and/or Google Authenticator may be exactly what you want from the client side.
I made a server-side implemention to get started with a little while ago:
https://github.com/adsllc/PHPO... [github.com]
Me too (Score:2)
I'd like something like this for a mixed Windows/Mac/Linux network but the costs are just prohibitive.
Yubikeys are $25 each for the hardware, and $45 PER USER. That's just ridiculous when you scale up, and there's an awful lot of manually faffing about to get to the point that it works.
To be honest, in my scenario (primary/secondary schools), I'm not looking for 2-factor as much as "I don't have to remember my password" login. If someone has the key, they have access (but only to another pupils account, w
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1) You've confused American "schools" with British schools, where the pupils are children. I specifically mention primary and secondary - primary is up to age 10/11.
2) We still have tracing of what was accessed, it's still against school rules to allow someone access to your account. Their actions aren't your responsibility but may have been your fault.
3) Any "school" that expels a kid for losing their key and another kid doing stuff on their account, won't be a school over here for long.
4) No school will
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I'd like something like this for a mixed Windows/Mac/Linux network but the costs are just prohibitive.
Yubikeys are $25 each for the hardware, and $45 PER USER. That's just ridiculous when you scale up, and there's an awful lot of manually faffing about to get to the point that it works.
Wait, what? Where do you get the $45 per user cost? I don't see that anywhere on their website.
The "YubiCloud" (where Yubico hosts the authenticator servers) has two modes: free and premium. The free service is open to everyone, even commercial users. The premium service offers an SLA and monthly usage statistics, and costs $3/YubiKey/year (1000-unit minimum).
You can also host your own local YubiKey authentication servers and keep things entirely in-house. Yubico has reference implementations for free on th
TOTP (Score:3)
Re:You can create a token but keep it off nets (Score:4, Insightful)
> For fans of software scheme: you must tell how your soft tokens resist attack by malware.
A solution doesn't have to be a panacea for all attacks. A soft token could be on your phone, assuming you do not also use the phone to directly access the service, that is pretty decent protection. I would consider needing to also find and gain access to your phone, in addition to whatever access they may otherwise be able to get, as a pretty decent addition to the resistence.
> Remember that to get pay-tv signals, folks were willing and able to design special ICs.
Remember that people were willing to pay for those ICs to decode signals they already otherwise had access to, meaning there was a rather large potential market for those ICs before they were produced, especially since it is decently hard to justify how you are doing anything wrong by simply recieving and manipulating a signal...you aren't even stealing a service, you are just, not using their descrabling service, just providing your own instead; for a signal you could already recieve.....
Re:You can create a token but keep it off nets (Score:5, Interesting)
All true and yet, I don't see how any of that matters. The point of using the phone is it is something you have, and its not tied to the device you are connecting with. Yes, you may lose the phone more often, BUT...that just means you replace the phone and reload the software with a new key....BFD.
Stealing your phone doesn't reveal what systems you would connect to. Getting access to your laptop, doesn't provide the authentication token. Its about using two factors that are not tied to eachother in a way that a remote attacker can discern that improves the security of such a system.
which is why I strongly disagree that an app on the laptop is better.... because an app on the laptop is on the laptop, one device which connects to it all. Or another way to think of it...where is the safest place for the key to your safe.... in an unmarked envelope in your house....or in an unmarked envelope at your friend's house?
Even if your friend's house is less secure than your own, its still the better place because.... there is no way for the attacker to make the association needed to find it....even if it is your friend's house that he robs, even if he finds the key there!
Sure its not protection from specific kinds of attackers, but, if your security measures need to stand up to NSA levels of scrutiny, I have no problem declaring your requirements out of scope for this level of discussion, and far beyond most people who could benefit from simple tokens.
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Strictly speaking, a USB (or bluetooth, or whaver) device has the potential to be MORE secure... IF it meets the following criteria:
* Negotiates directly with the remote service requesting authentication credentials, and has robust logic to detect MITM situations. For the purposes of this example, the local operating system is merely a bucket-brigade dumb transport layer that facilitates the delivery of packets between the token and remote login service.
* Has its own onboard hardkeys under the exclusive con
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I'm reminded of the IBM ZTIC. Great device, because it only used the computer as a means of getting power and a means of getting data from the device, via the USB port, over the network, to the bank, via a secured channel (encrypted from the device itself, so a malware-laden computer could only deny access, not tamper with packets.) When doing a bank transaction, the ZTIC would show on its screen the transaction and one would confirm/deny it on the device.
However, in the real world, I read complaints abou
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I am sorry that the advice I give for free on slashdot doesn't live up to the impossibly high standard of being unassailable by major national governments with deeper pockets than the vicar of christ.
Every system has weaknesses; if you have to worry about directed attacks by dedicated actors with the resources (time and skills, or money to hire them) to focus on your systems.... then by all means, don't take the free advice you get on slashdot and feel free to raise the bar high.
However, for everyone else,
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There is "secure enough". A token on a smartphone is vulnerable to unknown backdoors... but for almost anything but some high profile target, it will do the job decently well.
I have an older HTC phone (HTC One X Plus) running CM whose job it is to act as a backup token. Since it has no SIM card, and the Wi-Fi antenna isn't on, it is good enough. Physically, it uses dm-crypt and encrypts the /data partition using a long passphrase that is separate from the screen lock password. I don't think access to my
Smart cards work (Score:3)
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I am using ePass2003 and cryptoStick. They work ok, but they are a bit slow.
When I run: time ssh localhost true
It takes 1 second with with ePass2003 or cryptoStick. But with a key on disk (and ssh-agent), it takes I wonder if anyone know of a faster USB-token.
What do you really want to accomplish? (Score:2)
You only really need to let people get onto your corporate network if you want to set up "real" remote access such as VPN or, as you mention, one of those cr
OPIE may be what you want. (Score:3)
It's not a two factor authentication, it's actually a means of generating one time passwords. In a nutshell, you can have a local device calculate the password based upon a challenge sent from the system you wish to log onto, or you can preprint a list of passwords that you can use to log onto the system.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org] for a general description of the method. You ought to be able to find out more using that page as a starting point.
I use OPIE (Score:2)
I print out a list of 100 passwords, fold it up, and keep it in my wallet. Each time I use one, I cross it out. It is small, flat, easy to carry, and always with me. :)
Just don't let your users write the name of the server and their username on it.
Mobile OTP (Score:2)
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Mobile-OTP (http://motp.sourceforge.net/). Perhaps it's a bit older, but it's absolutely free assuming your users have a mobile phone. (It doesn't even necessarily have to be a smart phone). We use this to secure our SSH gateways and it's not bad to set up -- it uses PAM.
SQRL (Score:1)
See:- https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.... [grc.com]
Using a smartphone as your token, and if that is not secure enough for you, I am for my sins presently building an HSM that will interface over NFC with the smartphone to keep all the cryptography parts and master key outside of the potentially vulnerable computing platform. Further I promise as do many of us working on this project to make everything we can public domain or at the least open licensed.
Before making comment on this please do read and digest all the refe
Authy (Score:2)
https://www.authy.com/ [authy.com]
Its the easy button for 2FA
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I'm inclined to agree. People rarely forget their smartphones
I've been looking at DuoSecurity. Rather than SMS they send a push notification to your phone before clearing your login. No screwing around typing codes, just a "was that you logging in from 1.2.3.4?" popup on the phone that I can use to authorize the connection.
Anyone actually used them? Is it as good as their demos?
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I haven't done any admin or dev work with it, but as far as just logging in to the VPN at work Duo works very well. I initiate the VPN connection on my computer and get a pop-up on my phone almost instantly. Hit approve, and the VPN login on the computer completes. In my pre-smartphone days I used their SMS service. They'd send me 10 codes via SMS and the VPN login would say "enter code A", "enter code B", etc. Each code was used once, and a new bat
S/Key (Score:2)
RSA did implement their scheme as an iPhone app. If you're willing to consider something that might work as a smart-phone app, think about S/Key. It's supported as a PAM module for the *nixes. (Of course, that assumes you're willing to trust the smart-phone apps.)
I recall using S/key ages ago (1990s) back in the days of Telnet (before ssh.) Back then, if you didn't have an S/key calculator, you could also use a paper list of one-time passwords. Ever so often, we had to re-seed our s/key (because we li
TPMs (and OpenCryptoChip) (Score:2)
Multiple options (Score:3)
TOTP (time-based one time keys), HOTP (hmac? one time keys), and RFC6238 are todays friendly search terms.
TOTP is what the traditional RSA tokens use, in which the time is a component of the encryption used so the code generated from the private key changes (usually every 30 or 60 seconds)
HOTP is the latest in one time pads, where each code generated is good until used but only once.
It differs from true OTPs in that the data is procedurally generated from a private key instead of all the keys/data being generated in bulk ahead of time. One hopes the private key is smaller than a crap-ton of bulk keys or binary data needed for a true OTP.
Google Authenticator is one pre-made generic solution, and you don't need to use Google to utilize it.
The encryption it uses is open and has an RFC, and their own software lets you input the private key via QR code for the user if you wish, and utilize multiple profiles/keys.
Google released an open source PAM module for all your Linux authentication needs, including SSH.
I use this myself for access to my home network (ssh + port forwards)
There are also tons of programs that run the identical encryption methods, lots being open source.
I've seen them available for every OS commonly used (and then some) plus every smartphone out there.
I've also recently purchased a Yubico key, which is a hardware version of the RSA token.
The basic model runs $25 each if you buy single keys, and they can be loaded with up to two profiles using various encryption methods and keys.
Instead of an LCD display with a rolling code, they are USB devices that show up as USB keyboard HIDs. You plug it in and once the OS has it powered and ready, there is a touch-sensitive "button" you touch and the dongle types in the code valid for that 30 second period.
It also takes into account how long it needs to type the codes (sha256 with serial can be 158 characters and takes ~3-4 seconds to type in at the default key rate)
It will always type the key that will be valid at the time its about to hit enter.
Yubico is RFC6238 compatible, and also can utilize OpenRADIUS which then makes it compatible with pretty much everything.
A third option, though more for Windows login / Active Directory, and definitely not open source, is EIDVirtual.
It basically lets you reformat a USB flash drive to contain a 4k private key and special header so along with its smartcard driver extension, the keys show up as smart cards and USB flash (technically you can still store data on the drive if you want)
The software is very cheap (7 euro if I recall), works flawlessly in AD setups (tested on XP, 7, and 8), and uses any old flash drive with 1mb of storage.
The downside of course is you don't get any of the fancy (or even required) hardware protection of the private key. I believe it uses the USB drives serial and model/make as part of its formula so blind copying isn't trivial, but the hardware exists to easily fake that info for anyone intent on doing so.
Not nearly as secure as the other options, but it is at least priced accordingly, and doesn't try to add 2-3 zeros to the pricetag for the "enterprise" label.
smart cards (Score:2)
There are smart cards at affordable price. The biggest problem is to find some that can run without a binary blob driver (would you trust it?).
open hardware, open software, maximum flexibility (Score:1)
Server side HTTP (Score:1)
LinOTP + soft tokens (Score:1)