Re: Authentication question & problem

[Nick Owen <nickowen () mindspring com>]

evilwon12 () yahoo com wrote:
> Here is what my developers are wanting to do, and I cannot think of a
> secure way to do this.
>
> Have a user (at home) authenticate against our LDAP through a company
> portal/site and have that authentication information passed to an
> external vendor, allowing the user at home to utilize the application
> from home after being authenticated.
>
> So, it's user at site A, authenticating with site B, and the user at
> site A using the application (after authentiation) at site C.
>
> Sorry for being long winded, but everything there screams MITM to me.
> I am probably missing something easy.
(Apologies if this is duped - originally sent 4.22.08)

Every internet app is susceptible to MITM without some form of strong
mutual authentication.  User issues with certificates are well documented.

Seems to be the best way to do this is to do the mutual authentication
between the user (site a) and the application (site C) which then
proxies the authentication request to your ldap server (Site B) over an
SSL encrypted link.

If you perform the mutual authentication at your site (B), then you
would tunnel the access to the app on C to avoid a MITM there.  You
could probably do some form of federation, but I assuming that would be
too complex.

HTH,

Nick
--
Nick Owen
WiKID Systems, Inc.
404.962.8983
http://www.wikidsystems.com
Commercial/Open Source Two-Factor Authentication
irc.freenode.net: #wikid