Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: > For what it's worth, the possibility of this general type of attack was > repeatedly discussed in the IPsec working group and is a major reason > why XAUTH was abandoned. The particular password-stealing attack that I > describe as been widely discussed among IKE implementors for at least two > years; other implementors probably independently noticed it at least as > early as I did, which was three years ago. And we have technology deployed that solves exactly the same problem in a reasonable way: SSH. > What's pretty disturbing is that there is wide understanding of this > issue among actual protocol implementors, but that Cisco field personnel > continue to quite plainly tell customers that it does not exist at all, > even when the risk to those customers is huge. I have to admit that we were blinded as well. I didn't look too closely at XAUTH at that time because it was proprietary software and no GNU/Linux client was in sight. We should have forced Cisco to implement hybrid mode over two years ago, but failed to do so. I'm sorry about that mess.
