[149237] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: MD5 considered harmful
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (harbor235)
Tue Jan 31 13:15:48 2012
In-Reply-To: <4F282B4A.7000603@foobar.org>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:15:10 -0500
From: harbor235 <harbor235@gmail.com>
To: Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Sounds like we want a well thought out plan in place in case there is a
screw up
with an org's lack of planning and management capabilities..........
Mike
On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> wrote:
> On 31/01/2012 16:40, David Barak wrote:
> > Because downtime is a security issue too, and MD5 is more likely to
> > contribute to downtime (either via lost password, crypto load on CPU, or
> > other) than the problem it purports to fix. The goal of a network
> > engineer is to move packets from A -> B. The goal of a security
> > engineer is to keep that from happening. A business needs to weigh the
> > cost and benefit of any given approach, and MD5 BGP auth does not come
> > out well in the of situations.
>
> cpu load is negligible and is done in hardware on several platforms. Lost
> passwords can occur but if you have properly stored configuration backups,
> they shouldn't be a major problem. Also, they can be trivially decrypted
> from C/J configuration files.
>
> From my point of view, MD5 passwords serve two purposes:
>
> 1. they prevent intentional session hijacking at IXPs when IP addresses get
> re-used and new IP address assignees suddenly notice that some people
> haven't torn down their old BGP sessions to the previous users of the
> address
>
> 2. they can be used to convince security auditors that the network is
> secure and that they can now sod off and stop harassing me, kthxbai
>
> Other people may have other reasons for liking / not liking them.
>
> Nick
>
>
