The RC4-HMAC-MD5 KerberosV algorithm is based on RFC 4757 [0], which
was specifically issued for interoperability with Windows 2000, but was
never intended to receive the same level of support. The RFC says
The IETF Kerberos community supports publishing this specification as
an informational document in order to describe this widely
implemented technology. However, while these encryption types
provide the operations necessary to implement the base Kerberos
specification [RFC4120], they do not provide all the required
operations in the Kerberos cryptography framework [RFC3961]. As a
result, it is not generally possible to implement potential
extensions to Kerberos using these encryption types. The Kerberos
encryption type negotiation mechanism [RFC4537] provides one approach
for using such extensions even when a Kerberos infrastructure uses
long-term RC4 keys. Because this specification does not implement
operations required by RFC 3961 and because of security concerns with
the use of RC4 and MD4 discussed in Section 8, this specification is
not appropriate for publication on the standards track.
The RC4-HMAC encryption types are used to ease upgrade of existing
Windows NT environments, provide strong cryptography (128-bit key
lengths), and provide exportable (meet United States government
export restriction requirements) encryption. This document describes
the implementation of those encryption types.
Furthermore, this RFC was re-classified as 'historic' by RFC 8429 [1] in
2018, stating that 'none of the encryption types it specifies should be
used'
Note that other outdated algorithms are left in place (some of which are
guarded by CONFIG_SUNRPC_DISABLE_INSECURE_ENCTYPES), so this should only
adversely affect interoperability with Windows NT/2000 systems that have
not received any updates since 2008 (but are connected to a network
nonetheless)
[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4757
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8429
Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Acked-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>