Passwords

This weekend, I loaded five additional data breaches into Have I been pwned (HIBP) that had come from various forums running on vBulletin. These came via supporters that had collected them from data breach traders over the years and some of them dated back quite some time. I always go to great lengths to validate that a breach is indeed legitimate and one of the ways I do that is to take a real good look at the passwords stored in the system and ensure that they do indeed adhere to the sorts of password patterns we’re used to seeing (i.e. poorly chosen and often including the name of the site). Fortunately for my purposes here –...

This is somewhat of a perplexing acquisition, but apparently LastPass is now owned by LogMeIn. I get it in the-big-publicly-traded-company-gobbling-up-the-smaller-one kinda way, but it’s an odd marriage for a company that builds remote desktop software to buy one that builds a password manager. People aren’t real happy either when you look at the comments they’ve left on that post. Why aren’t they happy? I touched on it here: Very interesting to see how many people say they will now leave @LastPass as a result of the @LogMeIn acquisition. Reputation is critical. — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) October 10, 2015 You see, entrusting all your passwords to one organisation is a big thing. Companies...

So this has been getting quite a bit of airtime today: @Sacro Hi Ben, I understand but as a business we've chosen not to have the compatibility with password managers. Thanks, Joe — British Gas Help (@BritishGasHelp) July 14, 2015 Yes, it’s ridiculous and British Gas are getting the lambasting they so deserve, but egregious security faux pas is hardly a new thing for them: @passy We'd lose our security certificate if we allowed pasting. It could leave us open to a "brute force" attack. Thanks ^Steve — British Gas Help (@BritishGasHelp) May 6, 2014 But here’s what really gets me and this tweet sums it up perfectly: @troyhunt I...

I’ve long held the view that passwords should consist of as many crazy things as the owner deems fit. If I want to create a password that looks like a dog just ate the keyboard and threw up all the keys, then good for me. (Chances are that Fido is going to cough up a pretty unique password too but before PETA gets on my case, try using a password manager like 1Password instead.) Now I’m used to seeing all sorts of ridiculous limits on passwords – no “special” character, limit of 12 chars, no spaces, can’t use letters “q” or “z”, can’t use letters at...

Back in the day when the British had a penchant for conquering the world, they ran into a little problem on the subcontinent; cobras. Turns out there were a hell of a lot of the buggers wandering around India and it also turned out that they were rather venomous which didn’t sit well with the colonials. Ingenious as the British were, they decided to offer the citizens a bounty – you hand in dead cobras that would otherwise have bitten some poor imperialist and you get some cash. Problem solved. Unfortunately, the enterprising locals saw things differently and interpreted the “cash for cobras” scheme as a damn good reason to start breeding serpents and raking in...

Adobe had a little issue the other day with the small matter of 150 million accounts being breached and released to the public. Whoops. So what are we talking about? A shed load of records containing an internal ID, username, email, encrypted password and a password hint. Naked Security did a very good write up on Adobe’s giant-sized cryptographic blunder in terms of what they got wrong with their password storage so I won’t try to replicate that, rather I’d like to take a look at the password hints. This is an interesting one from an application security perspective and the rationale basically goes like this: In order to help people remember their passwords,...

I don’t know how Evernote stored my password, you know, the one they think might have been accessed by masked assassins (or the digital equivalent thereof). I mean I know that their measures are robust but then again, so were Tesco’s and according to their definition, “robust” means storing them in plain text behind a website riddled with XSS and SQL injection (among other security faux pas). Last year we saw LinkedIn breached and some millions of SHA1 passwords with no salt exposed. Last week we saw Australia’s own ABC do the same thing; it took me 45 seconds to crack 53% of those and others have since gone on to crack...

45 seconds. That’s how long it took to crack 53% of the ABC’s now very public password database. That’s more than half of the almost 50,000 passwords that were publically exposed today. How the passwords (among other data) were exposed is yet to play out, but what we now know for sure is that the mechanism the ABC used to protect these credentials was woefully inadequate. Here’s how it was done: Firstly, the dump comprises of 10 parts all listed over on Pastebin. All in all there are just under 50,000 records with the following attributes: user_id user_age user_town user_nick user_regip addedtomap user_email user_...

Last month I wrote about our password hashing having no clothes which, to cut to the chase, demonstrated how salted SHA hashes (such as created by the ASP.NET membership provider), offered next to no protection from brute force attacks. I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the background story on this (read that article before this one if not), but the bottom line was that cryptographic hashing of passwords needs to be way slower. Not half the speed or even one tenth of the speed, it needs to be thousands of times slower. The conclusion of the post was frankly, a little unsatisfying. Why? Because it essentially said “If you take my favourite technology...

Another week, another breach. This time Yahoo! was the target with 453,491 email addresses and passwords from their Voices service being exposed for all to see. Whilst unfortunate for those involved, these breaches do give us some unique insight into password practices and as is usually the case, it’s not pretty. Back in June last year after one of many Sony breaches I conducted a brief analysis and found a litany of bad password practices. Less than 1% of passwords contained a non-alphanumeric character, only 4% actually used more than two character types and 93% of passwords were between 6 and 10 characters long. What made the Sony analysis particularly easy (and relevant) was that there was...