Re: Compromise Authentication Proposal

[Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@INNOSOFT.COM>]

On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Erik Skovgaard wrote:
> If we set the bar too low, LDAP becomes useless
> to large installations.

This is the crux of the disagreement.  I claim that a bare-bones LDAP
server is inherently useless to large installations, regardless of what
requirements we include for authentication and whatnot.  There is a
fundamental quality of implementation issue, and large installations will
just have to shop around.  A separate profile of LDAP for large
installations which dicusses distributed authentication requrements,
management requirements, replication requirements and whatnot would be
quite useful to such large sites when shopping around.  But it doesn't
belong in the base spec and base requirements as those services aren't
necessary for basic on-the-wire interoperability required by 80% of LDAP
sites today.

> As far as I can see, the issue is mainly for clients.  How if we allow
> three profiles for clients:
> 
> 1. Clients with only anonymous and clear text password capabilities.
> 2. Clients that support 1. and lightweight strong authentication.
> 3. Clients that support 1. and scalable strong authentication.

This is exactly what the IESG is trying to get rid of (with good reason). 
Your three profiles implicitly make anything but unencrypted clear text
passwords non-interoperable.  The profiles I believe we want are: 

  1. Clients with read-only anonymous access.
  2. Clients with anonymous and lightweight digest authentication.
     (SHOULD do TLS + simple bind, MAY do simple bind)
  3. Clients with (2) plus "scalable strong authentication."

> 1. Servers which support anonymous, clear text passwords and lightweight
> strong authentication.
  (I'd add: SHOULD support TLS + simple bind, vanilla simple bind optional).
> 2. Servers which support 1. and scalable strong authentication.
> 
> How's that for a compromise?

I haven't seen anyone opposed to these two options.

		- Chris