[OATH-Toolkit-help] Bug#807992: Bug#807992: per user oath files

[Ilkka Virta]

A problem with doing that, is that anything that runs with the user's 
permissions could trivially read the secret key from the user's home 
directory. With SSH keys it's not a problem, since they are _public_ 
keys. Plus, a user could do something stupid, like resetting the OTP 
counter on every login, so they wouldn't need to use a pesky changing 
password, but instead use the same one always...

I think some unix-like systems have per-user password files under /etc, 
so that they don't need setuid-root helpers to access them, but there 
still is some program to sanity check the password the user tries to 
set. (a setgid helper plus some trickery with file and directory 
permissions.) Doing something like that would simplify the backend, but 
of course you'd still need a helper application to access the files.


On 15.12. 7:23, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> Package: libpam-oath
> Version: 2.4.1-1
> Severity: wishlist
>
> i find it problematic that the management of the OATH secrets is all
> centralised in a single file. it seems to me it would be preferable to
> delegate this management to users, the same way we have
> `~/.ssh/authorized_keys`.
>
> i suggest checking into `~user/.oath` for a similar format (obviously
> ommitting the username, to avoid forging other people's credentials).
>
> could that be considered?
>
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 8.2
>    APT prefers stable
>    APT policy: (500, 'stable'), (1, 'unstable')
> Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
> Foreign Architectures: i386
>
> Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
> Locale: LANG=fr_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
> Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
>
> Versions of packages libpam-oath depends on:
> ii  libc6           2.19-18+deb8u1
> ii  liboath0        2.4.1-1
> ii  libpam-runtime  1.1.8-3.1
> ii  libpam0g        1.1.8-3.1
>
> libpam-oath recommends no packages.
>
> libpam-oath suggests no packages.
>
> -- no debconf information

--
Ilkka Virta <address@hidden>