Network Working Group J Klensin Internet Draft R Catoe Document: draft-klensin-cram-01.txt P Krumviede MCI June 1996 IMAP/POP AUTHorize Extension for Simple Challenge/Response Status of this Memo This document is an Internet Draft. Internet Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its Areas, and its Working Groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet Drafts. Internet Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months. Internet Drafts may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is not appropriate to use Internet Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as a ``working draft'' or ``work in progress``. To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the Internet-Drafts Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net, nic.nordu.net, ftp.isi.edu, or munnari.oz.au. A revised version of this draft document will be submitted to the IESG for processing as a Proposed Standard for the Internet Community, updating RFC 1731. Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested. This document will expire before January 1, 1997. Distribution of this draft is unlimited. Abstract While IMAP4 supports a number of strong authentication mechanisms as described in RFC 1731, it lacks any mechanism that neither passes cleartext, reusable passwords across the network nor requires a significant security infrastructure. This specification provides a simple challenge-response authentication protocol that is suitable for use with IMAP4. Since it utilizes Keyed-MD5 digests and does not require that the secret be stored in the clear on the server, it may also constitute an improvement on APOP for POP3 use as specified in RFC 1734. 1. Introduction Existing Proposed Standards specify an AUTHENTICATE mechanism for the IMAP4 protocol [IMAP, IMAP-AUTH] and a parallel AUTH mechanism for the POP3 protocol [POP3-AUTH]. The AUTHENTICATE mechanism is intended to be extensible; the four methods specified in [IMAP-AUTH] are all fairly powerful and require some security infrastructure to support. The base POP3 specification [POP3] also contains a lightweight challenge-response mechanism called APOP. APOP is associated with most of the risks associated with such protocols: in particular, it requires that both the client and server machines have access to the shared secret in cleartext form. CRAM offers a method for avoiding such cleartext storage while retaining the algorithmic simplicity of APOP in using only MD5, though in a "keyed" method. At present, IMAP [IMAP] lacks any facility corresponding to APOP. The only alternative to the strong mechanisms identified in [IMAP-AUTH] is a presumably cleartext username and password, supported through the LOGIN command in [IMAP]. This document describes a simple challenge-response mechanism, similar to APOP and PPP CHAP [PPP], that can be used with IMAP (and, in principle, with POP3). 2. Challenge-Response Authentication Mechanism (CRAM) The authentication type associated with CRAM is "CRAM-MD5". The data encoded in the first ready response contains an presumptively arbitrary string of random digits, a timestamp, and the fully-qualified primary host name of the server. The syntax of the unencoded form must correspond to that of an RFC 822 'msg-id' [RFC822] as described in [POP3]. The client makes note of the data and then responds with a string consisting of the user name, a space, and a 'digest'. The latter is computed by applying the keyed MD5 algorithm from [KEYED-MD5] where the key is a shared secret and the digested text is the timestamp (including angle-brackets). This shared secret is a string known only to the client and server. The `digest' parameter itself is a 16-octet value which is sent in hexadecimal format, using lower-case ASCII characters. When the server receives this client response, it verifies the digest provided. If the digest is correct, the server should consider the client authenticated and respond appropriately. Keyed MD5 is chosen for this application because of the greater security imparted to authentication of short messages. In addition, the use of the techniques described in [KEYED-MD5] for precomputation of intermediate results make it possible to avoid explicit cleartext storage of the shared secret on the server system by instead storing the intermediate results which are known as "contexts". CRAM does not support a protection mechanism. Example: The examples in this document show the use of the CRAM mechanism with the IMAP4 AUTHENTICATE command [IMAP-AUTH]. The base64 encoding of the challenges and responses is part of the IMAP4 AUTHENTICATE command, not part of the CRAM specification itself. S: * OK IMAP4 Server C: A0001 AUTHENTICATE CRAM-MD5 S: + PDE4OTYuNjk3MTcwOTUyQHBvc3RvZmZpY2UucmVzdG9uLm1jaS5uZXQ+ C: dGltIDljZjYxYjFlOTZiOGU1MGIxMmZlNTgxMjNhMzUyNDQy S: A0001 OK CRAM authentication successful In this example, the shared secret is the string 'tanstaaftanstaaf'. Hence, the Keyed MD5 digest is produced by calculating MD5(tanstaaftanstaaf, pad2, MD5(tanstaaftanstaaf, pad1, <1896.697170952@postoffice.reston.mci.net>)) where pad1 and pad2 are as defined in the keyed-MD5 draft [KEYED-MD5] and the string shown in the challenge is the base64 encoding of <1896.697170952@postoffice.reston.mci.net> This produces a digest value (in hexadecimal) of 9cf61b1e96b8e50b12fe58123a352442 The user name is then prepended to it, forming tim 9cf61b1e96b8e50b12fe58123a352442 Which is then base64 encoded to meet the requirements of the IMAP4 AUTHENTICATE command (or the similar POP3 AUTH command), yielding dGltIDljZjYxYjFlOTZiOGU1MGIxMmZlNTgxMjNhMzUyNDQy 3. References [CHAP] Lloyd, B. and W. Simpson, "PPP Authentication Protocols", RFC 1334, October 1992. [IMAP] Crispin, M. "Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4", RFC 1730, University of Washington, December, 1994. [IMAP-AUTH] Myers, J. "IMAP4 Authentication Mechanisms", RFC 1731, Carnegie Mellon, December, 1994 [KEYED-MD5] Krawczyk,H "Keyed-MD5 for Message Authentication" work in progess (draft-krawczyk-keyed-md5-01.txt), IBM, November, 1995. [MD5] Rivest, R. "The MD5 Message Digest Algorithm", RFC 1321, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, April, 1992. [POP3] Myers, J. and M. Rose, "Post Office Protocol - Version 3 ", RFC 1939 (STD 53), Carnegie Mellon, May 1996. [POP3-AUTH] Myers, J. "POP3 AUTHentication command", RFC 1734, Carnegie Mellon, December, 1994. 4. Security Considerations It is conjectured that use of the CRAM authentication mechanism provides origin identification and replay protection for a session. Accordingly, a server that implements both a cleartext password command and this authentication type should not allow both methods of access for a given user. While the saving, on the server, of "contexts" (see section 2) is marginally better than saving the shared secrets in cleartext as is required by CHAP [CHAP] and APOP [POP3], it is not sufficient to protect the secrets if the server itself is compromised. Consequently, servers that store the secrets or contexts must both be protected to a level appropriate to the potential information value in user mailboxes and identities. As the length of the shared secret increases, so does the difficulty of deriving it. While there are now suggestions in the literature that the use of MD5 and keyed MD5 in authentication procedures probably has a limited effective lifetime, the technique is now widely deployed and widely understood. It is believed that this general understanding may assist with the rapid replacement, by CRAM-MD5, of the current uses of permanent cleartext passwords in IMAP. This document has been deliberately written to permit easy upgrading to use SHA (or whatever alternatives emerge) when they are considered to be widely available and adequately safe. See section 1 above for additional discussion. 13. Acknowledgements This memo borrows ideas and some text liberally from [POP3] and [RFC-1731] and thanks are due the authors of those documents. 14. Authors' Addresses John C. Klensin MCI Telecommunications 800 Boylston St, 7th floor Boston, MA 02199 USA Email: klensin@mci.net Tel: +1 617 960 1011 Randy Catoe MCI Telecommunications 2100 Reston Parkway Reston, VA 22091 USA Email: randy@mci.net Tel: +1 703 715 7366 Paul Krumviede MCI Telecommunications 2100 Reston Parkway Reston, VA 22091 USA Email: paul@mci.net Tel: +1 703 715 7251