path: root/doc/draft-ietf-secsh-auth-kbdinteract-05-cleaned.txt

            Generic Message Exchange Authentication For SSH
               <draft-ietf-secsh-auth-kbdinteract-05.txt>

Abstract

   SSH is a protocol for secure remote login and other secure network
   services over an insecure network.  This document describes a general
   purpose authentication method for the SSH protocol, suitable for
   interactive authentications where the authentication data should be
   entered via a keyboard.  The major goal of this method is to allow
   the SSH client to support a whole class of authentication
   mechanism(s) without knowing the specifics of the actual
   authentication mechanism(s).

1. Introduction

   The SSH authentication protocol [SSH-USERAUTH] is a general-purpose
   user authentication protocol. It is intended to be run over the SSH
   transport layer protocol [SSH-TRANS].  The authentication protocol
   assumes that the underlying protocols provide integrity and
   confidentiality protection.

   This document describes a general purpose authentication method for
   the SSH authentication protocol.  This method is suitable for
   interactive authentication methods which do not need any special
   software support on the client side.  Instead all authentication data
   should be entered via the keyboard.  The major goal of this method is
   to allow the SSH client to have little or no knowledge of the
   specifics of the underlying authentication mechanism(s) used by the
   SSH server.  This will allow the server to arbitrarily select or
   change the underlying authentication mechanism(s) without having to
   update client code.

   The name for this authentication method is "keyboard-interactive".

2. Rationale

   Currently defined authentication methods for SSH are tightly coupled
   with the underlying authentication mechanism.  This makes it
   difficult to add new mechanisms for authentication as all clients
   must be updated to support the new mechanism.  With the generic
   method defined here, clients will not require code changes to support
   new authentication mechanisms, and if a separate authentication layer
   is used, such as [PAM], then the server may not need any code changes
   either.

   This presents a significant advantage to other methods, such as the
   "password" method (defined in [SSH-USERAUTH]), as new (presumably
   stronger) methods may be added "at will" and system security can be
   transparently enhanced.

   Challenge-response and One Time Password mechanisms are also easily
   supported with this authentication method.

   This authentication method is however limited to authentication
   mechanisms which do not require any special code, such as hardware
   drivers or password mangling, on the client.

3. Protocol Exchanges

   The client initiates the authentication with a
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST message.  The server then requests
   authentication information from the client with a
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST message.  The client obtains the
   information from the user and then responds with a
   SSM_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE message.  The server MUST NOT send
   another SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST before it has received the
   answer from the client.

3.1 Initial Exchange

   The authentication starts with the client sending the following
   packet:

      byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST
      string    user name (ISO-10646 UTF-8, as defined in [RFC-2279])
      string    service name (US-ASCII)
      string    "keyboard-interactive" (US-ASCII)
      string    language tag (as defined in [RFC-3066])
      string    submethods (ISO-10646 UTF-8)

   The language tag is deprecated and SHOULD be the empty string.  It
   may be removed in a future revision of this specification.  The
   server SHOULD instead select the language used based on the tags
   communicated during key exchange [SSH-TRANS].

   If the language tag is not the empty string, the server SHOULD use
   the specified language for any messages sent to the client as part of
   this protocol.  The language tag SHOULD NOT be used for language
   selection for messages outside of this protocol.  The language to be
   used if the server does not support the requested language is
   implementation-dependent.

   The submethods field is included so the user can give a hint of which
   actual methods he wants to use.  It is a a comma-separated list of
   authentication submethods (software or hardware) which the user
   prefers.  If the client has knowledge of the submethods preferred by
   the user, presumably through a configuration setting, it MAY use the
   submethods field to pass this information to the server.  Otherwise
   it MUST send the empty string.

   The actual names of the submethods is something which the user and
   the server needs to agree upon.

   Server interpretation of the submethods field is implementation-
   dependent.

   One possible implementation strategy of the submethods field on the
   server is that, unless the user may use multiple different
   submethods, the server ignores this field.  If the user may
   authenticate using one of several different submethods the server
   should treat the submethods field as a hint on which submethod the
   user wants to use this time.

   Note that when this message is sent to the server, the client has not
   yet prompted the user for a password, and so that information is NOT
   included with this initial message (unlike the "password" method).

   The server MUST reply with either a SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS,
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_FAILURE, or SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST message.

   The server SHOULD NOT reply with the SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_FAILURE message
   if the failure is based on the user name or service name; instead it
   SHOULD send SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST message(s) which look just
   like the one(s) which would have been sent in cases where
   authentication should proceed, and then send the failure message
   (after a suitable delay, as described below).  The goal is to make it
   impossible to find valid usernames by just comparing the results when
   authenticating as different users.

3.2 Information Requests

   Requests are generated from the server using the
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST message.

   The server may send as many requests as are necessary to authenticate
   the client; the client MUST be prepared to handle multiple exchanges.
   However the server MUST NOT ever have more than one
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST message outstanding. That is, it may
   not send another request before the client has answered.

   The SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST message is defined as follows:

      byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST
      string    name (ISO-10646 UTF-8)
      string    instruction (ISO-10646 UTF-8)
      string    language tag (as defined in [RFC-3066])
      int       num-prompts
      string    prompt[1] (ISO-10646 UTF-8)
      boolean   echo[1]
      ...
      string    prompt[num-prompts] (ISO-10646 UTF-8)
      boolean   echo[num-prompts]

   The server SHOULD take into consideration that some clients may not
   be able to properly display a long name or prompt field (see next
   section), and limit the lengths of those fields if possible.  For
   example, instead of an instruction field of "Enter Password" and a
   prompt field of "Password for user23@host.domain: ", a better choice
   might be an instruction field of
   "Password authentication for user23@host.domain" and a prompt field
   of "Password: ".  It is expected that this authentication method
   would typically be backended by [PAM] and so such choices would not
   be possible.

   The name and instruction fields MAY be empty strings, the client MUST
   be prepared to handle this correctly.  The prompt field(s) MUST NOT
   be empty strings.

   The language tag SHOULD describe the language used in the textual
   fields.  If the server does not know the language used, or if
   multiple languages are used, the language tag MUST be the empty
   string.

   The num-prompts field may be `0', in which case there will be no
   prompt/echo fields in the message, but the client SHOULD still
   display the name and instruction fields (as described below).

3.3 User Interface

   Upon receiving a request message, the client SHOULD prompt the user
   as follows:

   A command line interface (CLI) client SHOULD print the name and
   instruction (if non-empty), adding newlines.  Then for each prompt in
   turn, the client SHOULD display the prompt and read the user input.

   A graphical user interface (GUI) client has many choices on how to
   prompt the user.  One possibility is to use the name field (possibly

   prefixed with the application's name) as the title of a dialog window
   in which the prompt(s) are presented.  In that dialog window, the
   instruction field would be a text message, and the prompts would be
   labels for text entry fields.  All fields SHOULD be presented to the
   user, for example an implementation SHOULD NOT discard the name field
   because its windows lack titles; it SHOULD instead find another way
   to display this information.  If prompts are presented in a dialog
   window, then the client SHOULD NOT present each prompt in a separate
   window.

   All clients MUST properly handle an instruction field with embedded
   newlines.  They SHOULD also be able to display at least 30 characters
   for the name and prompts.  If the server presents names or prompts
   longer than 30 characters, the client MAY truncate these fields to
   the length it can display.  If the client does truncate any fields,
   there MUST be an obvious indication that such truncation has occured.
   The instruction field SHOULD NOT be truncated.

   Clients SHOULD use control character filtering as discussed in
   [SSH-ARCH] to avoid attacks by including terminal control characters
   in the fields to be displayed.

   For each prompt, the corresponding echo field indicates whether or
   not the user input should be echoed as characters are typed.  Clients
   SHOULD correctly echo/mask user input for each prompt independently
   of other prompts in the request message.  If a client does not honor
   the echo field for whatever reason, then the client MUST err on the
   side of masking input.  A GUI client might like to have a checkbox
   toggling echo/mask.  Clients SHOULD NOT add any additional characters
   to the prompt such as ": " (colon-space); the server is responsible
   for supplying all text to be displayed to the user.  Clients MUST
   also accept empty responses from the user and pass them on as empty
   strings.

3.4 Information Responses

   After obtaining the requested information from the user, the client
   MUST respond with a SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE message.

   The format of the SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE message is as
   follows:

      byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE
      int       num-responses
      string    response[1] (ISO-10646 UTF-8)
      ...
      string    response[num-responses] (ISO-10646 UTF-8)

   Note that the responses are encoded in ISO-10646 UTF-8.  It is up to
   the server how it interprets the responses and validates them.
   However, if the client reads the responses in some other encoding
   (e.g., ISO 8859-1), it MUST convert the responses to ISO-10646 UTF-8
   before transmitting.

   If the num-responses field does not match the num-prompts field in
   the request message, the server MUST send a failure message.

   In the case that the server sends a `0' num-prompts field in the
   request message, the client MUST send a response message with a `0'
   num-responses field.

   The responses MUST be ordered as the prompts were ordered.  That is,
   response[n] MUST be the answer to prompt[n].

   After receiving the response, the server MUST send either a
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS, SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_FAILURE, or another
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST message.

   If the server fails to authenticate the user (through the underlying
   authentication mechanism(s)), it SHOULD NOT send another request
   message(s) in an attempt to obtain new authentication data, instead
   it SHOULD send a failure message.  The only time the server should
   send multiple request messages is if additional authentication data
   is needed (i.e., because there are multiple underlying authentication
   mechanisms that must be used to authenticate the user).

   If the server intends to respond with a failure message, it MAY delay
   for an implementation-dependent time before sending to the client.
   It is suspected that implementations are likely to make the time
   delay a configurable, a suggested default is 2 seconds.

4. Authentication Examples

   Here are two example exchanges between a client and server.  The
   first is an example of challenge/response with a handheld token.
   This is an authentication that is not otherwise possible with other
   authentication methods.

      C:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST
      C:   string    "user23"
      C:   string    "ssh-userauth"
      C:   string    "keyboard-interactive"
      C:   string    ""
      C:   string    ""

      S:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST
      S:   string    "CRYPTOCard Authentication"
      S:   string    "The challenge is '14315716'"
      S:   string    "en-US"
      S:   int       1
      S:   string    "Response: "
      S:   boolean   TRUE

      [Client prompts user for password]

      C:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE
      C:   int       1
      C:   string    "6d757575"

      S:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS

   The second example is of a standard password authentication, in
   this case the user's password is expired.

      C:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST
      C:   string    "user23"
      C:   string    "ssh-userauth"
      C:   string    "keyboard-interactive"
      C:   string    "en-US"
      C:   string    ""

      S:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST
      S:   string    "Password Authentication"
      S:   string    ""
      S:   string    "en-US"
      S:   int       1
      S:   string    "Password: "
      S:   boolean   FALSE

      [Client prompts user for password]

      C:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE
      C:   int       1
      C:   string    "password"

      S:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST
      S:   string    "Password Expired"
      S:   string    "Your password has expired."
      S:   string    "en-US"
      S:   int       2
      S:   string    "Enter new password: "
      S:   boolean   FALSE
      S:   string    "Enter it again: "
      S:   boolean   FALSE

      [Client prompts user for new password]

      C:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE
      C:   int       2
      C:   string    "newpass"
      C:   string    "newpass"

      S:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST
      S:   string    "Password changed"
      S:   string    "Password successfully changed for user23."
      S:   string    "en-US"
      S:   int       0

      [Client displays message to user]

      C:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE
      C:   int       0

      S:   byte      SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS

5. IANA Considerations

   The userauth type "keyboard-interactive" is used for this
   authentication method.

   The following method-specific constants are used with this
   authentication method:

   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_REQUEST           60
   SSH_MSG_USERAUTH_INFO_RESPONSE          61