Manual Pages  — OPIE

A solution to this whole problem was invented by Lamport in 1981. This technique was implemented by Haller, Karn, and Walden at Bellcore. They created a free software package called "S/Key" that used an algorithm called a cryptographic checksum. A cryptographic checksum is a strong one-way function such that, knowing the result of such a function, an attacker still cannot feasibly determine the input. Further, unlike cyclic redundancy checksums (CRCs), cryptographic checksums have few inputs that result in the same output.

In S/Key, what changes is the number of times the password is run through the secure hash. The password is run through the secure hash once, then the output of the hash is run through the secure hash again, that output is run through the secure hash again, and so on until the number of times the password has been run through the secure hash is equal to the desired sequence number. This is much slower than just, say, putting the sequence number in before the password and running that through the secure hash once, but it gains you one significant benefit. The server machine you are trying to connect to has to have some way to determine whether the output of that whole mess is right. If it stores it either without any encoding or with a normal encoding, a cracker could still get at your password. But if it stores it with a secure hash, then how does it account for the response changing every time because the sequence number is changing? Also what if you can never get to the machine any way that can't be listened in on? How do you change your password without sending it over the link?

The clever solution devised by Lamport is to keep in mind that the sequence number is always decrementing by one and that, in the S/Key system, simply by running any response with a sequence number N through the secure hash, you can get the response with a sequence number N+1, but you can't go the other way. At any given time, call the sequence number of the last valid response that the system got N+1 and the sequence number of the response you are giving it N. If the password that generated the response for N is the same as the one for N+1, then you should be able to run the response for N through the secure hash one more time, for a total of N+1 times, and get the same response as you got back for N+1. Once you compare the two and find that they are the same, you subtract one from N so that, now, the key for N that you just verified becomes the new key for N+1 that you can store away to use the next time you need to verify a key. This also means that if you need to change your password but don't have a secure way to access your machine, all the system really needs to have to verify your password is a valid response for one more than the sequence number you want to start with.

Just for good measure, each side of all of this uses a seed in conjunction with your password when it actually generates and verifies the responses. This helps to jumble things up a little bit more, just in case. Otherwise, someone with a lot of time and disk space on their hands could generate all the responses for a lot of frequent passwords and defeat the system.

This is not, by any means, the best explanation of how the S/Key algorithm works or some of the more minor details. For that, you should go to some of the papers now published on the topic. It is simply a quick-and-dirty introduction to what's going on under the hood.

Adding OPIE authentication to programs other than the ones included as clients in the OPIE distribution isn't very difficult. First, you will need to make sure that the program includes <stdio.h> somewhere. Then, below the other includes such as <stdio.h>, but before variable declarations, you need to include <opie.h>. You need to add a variable of type "struct opie" to your program, you need to make sure that the buffer that you use to get a password from the user is big enough to hold OPIE_RESPONSE_MAX+1 characters, and you need to have a buffer in which to store the challenge string that is big enough to hold OPIE_CHALLENGE_MAX+1 characters.

When you are ready to output the challenge string and know the user's name, you would use a call to opiechallenge. Later, to verify the response received, you would use a call to opieverify. For example:

        #include <stdio.h>

                .

                .

        #include <opie.h>

                .

                .

        char *user_name;

        /* Always remember the trailing null! */

        char password[OPIE_RESPONSE_MAX+1];

                .

                .

        struct opie opiedata;

        char opieprompt[OPIE_CHALLENGE_MAX+1];

                .

                .

        opiechallenge(&opiedata, user_name, opieprompt);

                .

                .

        if (opieverify(&opiedata, password)) {

                printf("Login incorrect");

When using OPIE, you need to be careful not to allow your password to be communicated over an insecure channel where someone might be able to listen in and capture it. OPIE can protect you against people who might get your password from snooping on the line, but only if you make sure that the password itself never gets sent over the line. The important thing is to always run the OPIE calculator on whichever machine you are actually using - never on a machine you are connected to by network or by dialup.

You need to be careful about the X Window System, because it changes things quite a bit. For instance, if you run an xterm (or your favorite equivalent) on another machine and display it on your machine, you should not run an OPIE calculator in that window. When you type in your secret password, it still gets transmitted over the network to go to the machine the xterm is running on. People with machines such as X terminals that can only run the calculator over the network are in an especially precarious position because they really have no choice. Also, with the X Window System, as with some other window system (NeWS as an example), it is sometimes possible for people to read your keystrokes and capture your password even if you are running the OPIE calculator on your local machine. You should always use the best security mechanism available on your system to protect your X server, be it XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1, XDM-MAGIC-COOKIE-1, or host access control. *Never* just allow any machine to connect to your server because, by doing so, you are allowing any machine to read any of your windows or your keystrokes without you knowing it.

S/Key is a trademark of Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). UNIX is a trademark of X/Open.

skey-users-request@thumper.bellcore.com