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Comment by MattJ100 | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned this in the operators channel just now, but also worth noting is that channel binding (e.g. SCRAM-*-PLUS in combination with RFC 9266) also mitigates this attack. Essentially the connecting client is able to detect the mismatch between the certificate or handshake the server thinks it is presenting, and the one the client actually sees.

ejabberd and Prosody support it, and a number of clients too.

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> I mentioned this in the operators channel just now, but also worth noting is that channel binding (e.g. SCRAM-*-PLUS in combination with RFC 9266) also mitigates this attack.

Doesn't that require the server to persistently store user passwords in plaintext?

Not at all. If you mean SCRAM, it was actually pretty novel when it was introduced because it allows the server to store a hash, the client to store a hash, and only a hash is exchanged over the wire.

SCRAM also allows the client to verify that the server possesses the password (or a hash of it), so a MITM that just says "yep, your credentials are correct - go ahead!" can be detected.

Channel binding is an addition to SCRAM (it's usable outside of SCRAM too) that allows securely checking the TLS stream as well. Specifically it allows verification that the TLS stream is terminated by the same entity that has (a hash of) your password.

no, scram is all about not exchanging and not storing plain text passwords. the plus variants add tls channel binding.

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