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MS Employee Calls for No More Passwords
BobPaul writes "On his blog, Robert Hensing of the Microsoft PSS Security Team makes a really convincing argument for the abolishment of complicated passwords. He argues that precomputed hash tables, network sniffing, and programs like LoftCrack make passwords obsolete and dangerous in the windows environment. What does he recommend in their place? Passphrases: sentences and quotes that are easy to remember but may be more than 30 or 40 characters in length. With many companies requiring frequent password changes, (and we know exactly where that leads) this is a simple idea I'm surprised more people haven't been doing this more often."
What about biometrics? Passphrases are nothing more than longer passwords. I can see several things resulting from
converting to all passphrases. First, the person will probably use the same passphrase for everything because it's too difficult
to remember multiple passphrases. Second, it's difficult to remember passphrases! Phone numbers (In the US, at least) are limited to
10 digits because research shows the average person can only memorize 10 digits, as a result...we tend to write things down, or in the case of
data people are likely to store their passphrases in a central location that is still prone to theft/decryption.
Biometrics, on the other hand, requires that you only have your body present at the time! No special USB keys to lug around, no pieces of
paper with important passwords/phrases. This won't solve the problem of possible data interception when talking about remote
authentication--but every form of authentication is prone to such attacks when transmitted.
One thing I just read in my MCSE study book... Windows 2000 and up support 127-character passwords, but Windows NT, Windows 9x and Windows ME only support 14-characters in a password. A user who has a Windows password greater than 14 characters simply cannot using the older operating systems even if they otherwise should be able to.
Therefore, if you have any legacy systems to support, these password tips don't apply to you, and that's got to be part of the reason there hasn't been much of a movement to suggest that users use longer passwords.
is that it takes longer to type. But for a highly secure system, I doubt you could beat a phrase or sentence -- particularly in an obscure language or containing obscure words, to make dictionary cracking even more difficult.
One of the main obstacles to better security is that people are fundamentally lazy. Typing 30 or 40 characters is difficult to do, and it takes time, so people won't do it. Or if forced to do it, they will whine about it -- a lot.
I have convinced a majority of my friends & family to at least stop using dictionary words and names of pets. Instead, I have them pick some favorite line from a movie or book and then use the first letter of each word. It's easy to remember, so they don't stick it on the bottom of their keyboard. It also is not a word in the dictionary so at least Crack & friends can't be used to guess it.
For example, if one of my friends is a Dead Head, he might use "stlasom.oticbs" If you're a Dead Head you'll probably be able to guess the lyric. But you *won't* be able to find it in a dictionary.
Now replacing my brute force wordlists with "He's dead, Jim", "In soviet russia, passphrases validate YOU" and "passwords are for old korean people" will allow root access to 90% of the internet.
The amount of times I type in my passwords each day, it would be frustrating to take even more time out of my day to type these "pass phrases" in.
What we really need is more biometrics.
Edited 10/18/2004:
This blog has gained far more attention than I could have ever imagined when I decided to create a small personal blog devoted to security incident response. I never imagined my first ever post would be as controversial or as widely published / linked as it has become!
If he thought his little blog had gained all of the attention it could back in October...
With all of the vulnerabilities and exploits in Windows who needs a password anyways? ;-)
So when the user creates there password it will be: "This is my passphrase" instead of "password"
USB is ubiquitous now, and the technology to build USB keys has reached the commodity point. USB flash drives of a gigabyte or more are less than $200, and a security key wouldn't need to be anywhere near that big. One with just a few kilobytes of memory could contain an encrypted private key that's unlocked with a password.
This idea strikes me as being so obvious that I can't imagine I'm the only one to think of it. Where's the fatal flaw that I'm not seeing?
Fact: Did you know that Windows 2000 based operating systems support pass-PHRASES of up to 127 characters including spaces...
/etc/pam.d/system-auth ---
... snip ...
/etc/security/policy.conf ---
... snip ...
... snip ...
Wow that's impressive.
Oh wait... no it isn't.
---
password required pam_unix.so md5 remember=5
---
CRYPT_ALGORITHMS_ALLOW=1,2a,md5
CRYPT_DEFAULT=1 #Compatible with BSD/Linux MD5
Because you know, all those ancient Unix systems kept you from using passwords more than 8 letters long.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Microsoft has been quite consistent with their position on passwords.
Hackers, worms, and trojans have long been able to get into Windows without passwords.
I've actually used a Lipsum generator for passwords for a long time on sensitive machines. Because they consist of very pronouncable latin roots, its easy to remeber them. One I don't use anymore for example was Etiam_Tristique_Turpis. Not easy to crack for I imagine, but easy for me to remeber.
isn't password just a common name? I mean, if you want, you could just use a phrase as your password, afaik blank space still counts as a character...
http://stoploudness.org/
And I quote, "Open Sesame!"
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
An easy way to get stronger passwords is to make them consist of the first letter of every word in a phrase. For example:
I wish I had some nachos to eat at work
would become:
IwIhsnteaw
Okay, it can still be brute force attacked but it certainly can't be efficiently dictionary hacked. Furthermore, for most of our needs, this works just fine. Add a number into the phrase and even better.
As the article mentions, passwords get hard to brute force at about 10 characters.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Perhaps we should just forget passwords all together and just trust one another...trust that when you walk away without locking your workstation that a mass email is going to be sent out from your workstation telling folks that you're coming out of the closet....no wait...you can't trust people.
or
Make of that what you want, but:
Of course, I changed the password to something more politically correct before leaving the companies....
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
"If you play a Windows XP installation CDROM backwards, you hear a message from Satan. Even worse... if you play it forwards, it installs Windows XP."
That should be easy to remember.
And i'm to paranoid to put my rsa key in the trusted hosts file of all the servers y administrate, so, i type nearly 10 different passwords, and each of them is 10 characters in length, numbers + words, all with DIferENt CasES. I have to type them all the time, having such long passwords as sentences, would be tottally impractical.
ALMAFUERTE
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Weather a finger print or longer password (passphrase) is used makes absolutly no difference.
As long as data can be sniffed between computers, nothing is secure. When are they going to pull thier finger out and see that the real security lies within the communication protocols themselves and the OS you use. Its that simple.
If a secure connection can be established, everything else doesnt matter.
the root password on all my Linux boxen is about the size of a paragraph, a small dirty poem i made up...
Would you leave you passphrase written down on every nearby surface?
Becuase your fingerprints will be all over unless you wear gloves all the time.
Other body parts aren't quite this extreame but still have similar weaknesses.
The headline to this story is an example of the kind of journalistic sensationalsism that is leading this country down the road to ruin and chaos. It gives the exciting implication that a Microsoft employee is proposing the abolition of the commonly-used password verification system and perhaps its replacement with some new and cutting edge technological method such as biometrics or one-way phrenosenticism.
Instead, the Microsoft employee is merely suggesting the use of longer passwords. I am shocked and appalled that a respectable forum such as Slashdot is stooping to "sexing up" its material in this manner.
I don't really have a problem with passwords since I keep them all stored at c:\pass.txt.
That blog is from 2004.. Anyway, I've been using pass-PHRASES for years, on BSD systems and Windows 2000. My Windows 2000 password used to have 63 characters. Nobody believed me, because nobody realized it wasn't any kind of random junk, but two mixed sentences I could easily remember.
this is a simple idea I'm surprised more people haven't been doing this more often.
;-)))
*yeah, right*
this "idea" is described in every single tutorial/howto/paper/note about password security. it's a good idea, i've been doing it for years, it has most likely been mentioned on slashdot countless times, but here we go again.
at times i forget why i am such an avid reader; it provides me with "stuff that matters" and makes me feel like i know more than all the others, from time to time
jethr0
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/12/2 334200
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Read other people's messages before posting yours to avoid simply duplicating what has been said already.
Read other peoples message before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what's already been said. ...could all be the same passphrase.
In standard user applications, like hotmail and the like, how bad could it be?
ba ding :-)
Just make a long strong password using the first letter from each word in a sentance.
iswtfmtosadgawd
I spend way too fucking much time on slashdot and don't get any work done
Give your users something funny and they won't forget it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Add a made-up word and that would be a fairly good passphrase
(I think that's why you posted it, correct?)
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Bible dictionnary attack could work for a lot of passphrase if this kind of password were to become mainstream.
:) )
IMHO, passphrase would make it easier for a hacker to successfully hack a system. For example, myself:
- Make a google search for my name
- See that The White Stripes is among my favourite groups
- Add The White Stripes lyrics to the crack dictionnary
- Attack, and probably succeed (password = "Why can't you be nicer to me?").
The list of all quotes in imdb mustn't be THAT big. Thus "I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next" would be a bad password. (not to mention "whoa"
Of course, IANASB (security blogger), I could be wrong.
perception is reality
...with your new long pass-phrase (decent idea there), pick some letters to substitute with numbers or punctuation. Yes, it'll look like 1337 scratch, but hey, all the more fucked up, all the better. And it's quite easy to remember what you substituted if you use it fairly often.
Mix them together and you have a fairly secure password that can't be guessed unless the attacker knows you very well or has some keylogger.
However, the problem that remains is that people are lazy and a small mistake will still invalidate the password... and as you go to 30-40 characters, its more and more likely that you make a simple speling mistake or spaceommision or s;omething. What is really needed for "passphrase" acceptance is a level of "fuzziness" so that you can make one or two minor mistakes but it still accepts your input... but then again, pass phrases are more accepted in voice input than typing.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
you failed it, but i will agree windoze is kludge :^P
I ended up stumbling upon this concept, and wondered why it wasn't recommended more often.
I had to create a secure-shell passphrase. The program, when I created the private key, didn't ask me to name a "password." It said, please enter a "passphrase." As a result, I have a much longer, more secure password, and absolutely no difficulties in remembering it.
Think about it this way:
a) Please enter a password, made of letters, characters, numbers, etc, but no dictionary words, and keep it over 8 characters long, and remember that you're going to have to change it every week, and no fair writing it down. Examples: w%df#flw0234, 534##@slkfjkljluiui, ajajajoiejflkjd2341324.
or
b) Please enter a phrase, 3-10 words long. Examples: Ireallyenjoydrinkingbeer, runningintowallskindofhurts, touchmymonkeytouchit.
Which of the two would you rather do? So why don't we just tell people to enter a passphrase than a password?
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
1) it's just as easy (give or take the odd case where you're just able to sample a few bytes) to sniff a passphrase as a password
2) if most people's passphrases are made of dictionary words take from their active vocabularies, dictionary attacks are still very possible. If we figure a typical vocabulary of 25000 words and a six-word phase, hmmm, some quick math indicates we're in the range of a 14-character random alphanumeric+punctunation password -- not too bad. (Especially if you grant people bigger vocabularies....) But, suddenly, we're open to language-based attacks -- there's probably thesis project in here for someone to come up with good algorithms to narrow down the required attack dictionary.
"If we weren't all crazy we would go insane" (Jimmy Buffet rules) "Send the pain below!" (I like Chevell too) "Mean people suck!" (it's true) These are 'sample passphrases' provided in the article. However, there are two main things that I consider make of this a not-so-good idea: a) Being that these are actual phrases, is it that easy to remember the exact punctuation, capitalization, and even grammar used? Hell, even for case insensitive passwords, you still have to remember exactly how it is written. For instance, what if I wrote: "Mean people suck!" (It's true), or "Mean people suck!" (it is true)?? b) Most textboxes where one is to input one's password are actually shadowed, so that you can't actually see what you're typing. How fun would it be typing your passphrase and not knowing exactly where you were at once you have something like ********************?
The password prompts just need to read "Pedo mellon a minno."
Simple, easy to remember, contains a number, has a period and comma, and is over 50 characters. I don't know about you, but these phrase passwords sound like a good idea.
it's l0phtcrack
Perhaps I'm too sleepy to think (I'm too sleepy to read the article), but precisely what is the difference?
A password is a string you know, a passphrase is a string you know.
One is probably longer than the other, big deal.
2, or 3, or 4 factor authorisation schemes are the only way forward. Like those used by some banks in, erm, Sweden ?
most/all users will use words in the dictionary so that 20 or so pass phrase would not be as hard to hack as a 20 char password with "random" letters. maby add space . ? ! to your things before/after/between words and your no longer trying to do something that can't be done with the current computers.
The average Windows end-user in America still "hunts and pecks". Typing 30 to 40 characters without mistakes would take them several minutes.
The very idea that someone who should know better could propose something this ludicrous is astonishing.
Asking the typical Joe Sixpack Windows user to type 30 to 40 characters is like asking them to cut their own nose off. I've once had someone tell me how "painful" it was to type my email address. Which has under a dozen characters in it.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Can't we just shoot the crackers?
Excel can't compute big numbers.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Modern unicies broke away from crypt(1) a _long_ time ago and advocated the use of passphases vs. passwords. Ever hear of Jack the Ripper?
Why is it that suddenly now when a microsoft employee "discovers" this last year it's news? I feel sorry for the guy.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Anyone smart who uses passphrases, will sufficiently mangle them to defeat dictionary attacks. For example, why use "They were the best of times, they were the worst of times," when with a little forethought, you could as easily remember "They were the b3st of t1mes, they were the w0rst of tim3s." Those numbers could go anywhere, and switching out all the possibilities for every character of every phrase would take far longer than just a brute force dictionary attack.
My password is a 79 character alphanumerical combination of numbers and words.
...
Of course it's rather hard to tell people what the password really is
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
The thing about a token is that you only have to remember a "simple" 4-8 character PIN, yet it can still provide high quality keys. It can be used to store very long, complex passwords, or it can do PKI type things on the token itself without ever exposing the private key(s).
The protection is in the fact that you can't use a brute force attack against most of these tokens because they lock or destroy themselves after a certain low number of incorrect PIN attempts.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
If you make passwords too complex or hard to remember then people forget them all the time or do things that make negate the security aspects of passwords completely such as writing them down saving them inside an application or making them incredibly easy to guess so that they can remember them. However is replacing them with sentences or phases really a better idea? While they are likely more difficult to crack who wants to type in a sentence every time they want to login? As an alternative biometric options are finally starting to become more affordable. There are relatively inexpensive biometric mice now that will read a finger print. Perhaps these could be used as a password substitute.
Passphrases are just long passwords with (usually) low entropy. They still have the same problems... You have to have a separate passphrase for each account, and you have to trust the computer you're using not to log your keystrokes. I would much rather carry around a device that can authenticate me and never have to remember a password again.
Why don't we all just switch to USB tokens for authentication? You have one device that can authenticate you by generating an RSA signature without divulging any information that would allow someone else to pretend to be you. It amazes me that more people don't use these things. I've never used one, but have considered ordering one. Does anyone out there have experience with USB tokens? Is there a good model/brand to buy? Is it easy to get them to work with Linux and ssh? Do any brick-and-mortar stores sell them?
"You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed? Pure West Virginia. What's your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? You know how quickly the boys found you... all those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars... while you could only dream of getting out... getting anywhere... getting all the way to the FBI."
Then I can goof off all day claiming that I can't enter my pass phrase correctly. :)
The company I work for has a password policy like this:
1. Must contain at least 8 characters
2. Must contain at least 2 lowercase letters
3. Must contain at least 2 capital letters
4. Must contain at least 2 numbers
Since a lot of people cant grok this we start to see passwords like 34erdfCV. If you are using a QWERTY keyboard take a look at that password and tell me whats wrong with it.
Since I saw this article in a MS Security newsletter I've started using passphrases. Here is an example of my Windows Server 2003 administrator login (local only, not going to help you). "Rent is due on the 5th". Now I see many comments already talking about how that is so much harder to type than "34erdfCV" but I beg to differ. For me at least it is much easier to type a coherent sentense than a bunch of random letters and numbers.
This password is not only easy to type, but it is very secure. I'm sure some mathematician is going to come down on my with a bunch of stats about how I'm wrong and what not but just the fact that the LM hash is not stored when you use a password larger than 14 characters helps significantly. Sure you can tell windows not to store a LM hash by editing the registry but do you really expect all employees of a mid size company to follow directions that start out like "Click Start, then Run. Type 'regedit' and click OK"?
Now of course this isn't going to defend you against the ol' linux bootdisk trick, or that awesome "NT Password Recovery" bootdisk, which is basically linux which allows you to overwrite the password, but thats what NTFS and encryption is for. And if you've got physical access all bets are off anyway. At least you know they wont be able to run a rainbow table lookup on your LM hash and figure it out in a few seconds.
Also, passphrases are easier to remember, harder to guess, harder to figure out by watching someone type them, and if your really that dense you can just pick up a book off your shelf, turn to a page, type in the first sentense and remember the book and page number.
And there is an added bonus to having a passphrase over 14 characters that you are all completely missing here. When the hot chick in accounting sees you keying in some enormously long password she will think your smart and savy and will want to have hot sex with you right there in the server room.
Well, maybe not the hot chick and sex part.
Now, what would be a good long slashdot post without a question for you to ponder. If you havent figured yet I'm the sysadmin at this company and am trying my hardest to find a way to "sell" this passphrase idea. It seems that the easiest thing to do in IT is configure complex servers and firewalls and support ID10T's. The hard part is "selling" common sense stuff like SSL and passphrases.
"You mean we're going to have to add an 's' to the end of 'http', do you really expect 100 people to change their bookmarks! They've been using those bookmarks all year!"
Insight from other admins very welcome.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Unfortunately some distributions limit passwords to only 8 or 12 characters...
Invent some source code static and dynamic analysis tools that help improve software quality as relates to security.
Passwords matter NOT AT ALL when you can just send a packet and get full admin access without any authentication step.
Who the hell else is better suited to innovate on security than Microsoft? We are to believe that they have 50,000 geniuses working there on groundbreaking amazing stuff... and the best thing they can come up with is a Java ripoff and a desktop search doodad? No. There are enough smart people there (or enough funds to create university research projects outside the softie-dome) to wow the world with some kickass new technology based on either genuinely new ideas, or old ideas that needed a lot of refinement to be usable on real code.
I suspect, though, that this is something they're unwilling to do because the design itself is inherently insecure, and securing it would mean breaking 99% of shipping apps. If that's true, it means that Bill's committment to security is just lip service. Please, Microsoft, break apps that use crappy backdoors. XP SP2 broke stuff to improve security, and that was the right decision. Apple had to do something similar with the Carbon transition (breaking old apps that correctly used well documented but ill-concieved APIs from the pre-OS X days). Microsoft could provide tools to help ISVs be compatible with a Longhorn "clean API" that doesn't let apps use deprecated, unsafe features from the bad old days of not caring about security.
Of course, they won't.
How about "MS Employee Calls for Really Frickin' HUGE Passwords" instead?
FLASH NEWS: longer passwords more secure than shorter passwords.
I mean, COME ON!
Passphrases are still crap. What if the machine I'm on has a key logger?
Fortunatly it is stupidly easy to set up a one time password system on my (Debian) machine. How can I do this for Windows?
No, I didn't RTFA. I don't need to. Why? I have a Linux box with a passphrase over 100 characters that is an easy to remember wording. It is a ROYAL pain in the ass. You miss one character and you have to type in the whole thing again. Yes, I have tried changing it, but for some unexplained reason, the box refuses to let me change it. I haven't taken the time to research it. I digress.
IMHO, the time for biometric passwords is here.
Consequently, instead of trying a brute force cracking approach that creates passwords consisting of random letters, the cracking approach would create passwords consisting of random words.
By reducing the cracking approach to only construct phrases using proper English grammar, the number of probably password phrases is reduced dramatically.
Granted, clever users will insert random numbers and punctuation into their password phrases. But this just increases the complexity of memorizing the password, which is what the Microsoft employee advocates against.
In such a scenario, I'm guessing that users who currently use simple passwords would pick phrases that are easy to generate or guess. Users who currently use complex passwords would pick phrases which include numbers and punctuations.
In any event, increasing the number of possible passwords by increasing the number of permutations is a good start. It would make it more difficult to crack the password of any given user. But how much do you want to bet that a cracking utility would hash the following phrases at a large corporation, and get at least one match within the password file?
"There's no place like home"
"Th3r3s n0 plac3 l1k3 h0m3"
"My b0ss suxx0r"
"I need a vacation"
works very nicely, but all it is is a very long password, it'll only be some time before passphrases are crakable too. the best phrases are the ones that are on the side of strange, like (haven't used either example for a while now, sorry) "The more you run over a dead cat, the flatter it gets." or "Set your mind free and your johrbloks will follow.", and yes the random hash word would improve that, but are you really going to remember it??
AHAHA no suprise this came from an MS Employee. being the #1 hated company in the world (by geeks) you have no idea how shitty our bandwidth is inside microsoft.
Im new and ive been told our password policy (how many characters, how long their good for, how many it remebers) and its INSANE! every internal resource has a password, most use the same password, but a lot dont.
god help me in 2 months when its time to change them all. hhmmm.. where did i leave my postit-note pad?
For those companies that require an ID card or badge to enter the building, the solution is to use a smartcard with a private key burned into memory.
1. The card has a picture of you (Someone you are)
2. The card has a private key that can only be unlocked using a conventional password (Something you have)
3. The user still has to enter a simple password into the system when the card is entered into the system (Something you know)
or at least, similar stuff. I use long phrases, but only the first, or first two letters of each word. Perhaps capitalizing every other letter. so that last sentence might give you a password of "PeCaEvOtLe".
Or alternatively, the letter count of a phrase, so "I like yams" would be 144 (you'd use a longer phrase of course).
Or the first 10 digits of PI, typed with the shift key held down: #!$!%(@^%#.
There are a ton of possibilities, just be creative.
Except for that Indian guy in the next office who never misses a key. Should have been a pianist.
Are ever-more-complex passcodes really the future of security? Guessing programs will keep getting faster and faster, after all. The real problem is login programs that don't notice guessing. A good login program should get cranky after a few dozen failed attempts, and log them all. Then 8-character passwords should be plenty. (eg, "get cranky" might mean "ignore the guessing IP or workstation for n++ minutes")
Doesn't much matter, I think. We'll just start seeing Bartlett the Ripper attacks instead.
the real problem is LM hashing. It has to be the dumbest thing ever
Passphrases: sentences and quotes that are easy to remember but may be more than 30 or 40 characters in length.
Quotes? methinks that is an invitation to dictionary attacks no?
Wouldn't it be really easy to store hashes on "well known" quotes easier than well know words? Sheer volume of words versus quotes and all.
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
guesses on how long until ms gets a patent on the use of pass phrases? never mind that pgp, etc. have been using them for over a decade now at least.
I remember reading a list of common passwords, and NCC1701 was in the top 100, along with subsequent C and D model. You know who you are.
The issue is sustained typing speed and the inaccuracies that result. Assuming:
...You'd be typing at approximately 120 words per minute. This is too much to ask of your "average" user, plodding along at 20-30 WPM. I type at "only" 101 WPM, yet people give me strange looks when I work in the library. I think you're expectations exceed consumers' true abilities.
A) You type in English
B)The average word length in day-to-day spoken English is five characters
C)You maintain your burst-speed for the full duration of your typing the longer password
Write your password in another language other than the one you are fluent in. When was the last time a brute-force attempt was made using a French dictionary? :)
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Authorization Picard Omega One Alpha
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
From TFA:I'll use his last one ("Mean people suck!").
Given a vocab of 25,000 words, that gives us
25,000*25,000*25000=15,625,000,000,000
Roughly the same security as provided by a 9 letter password using only lower case letters.
26*26*26*26*26*26*26*26*26=5,429,503,67
Swapping 3's for e's and so forth will only mean that a couple different versions of each word would have to be searched. Each such variant (e-3, a-4, i-1) doubles the number of passwords. But it ONLY doubles them. Just adding an additional lower case letter to the end would make it 26 TIMES more complex.
He makes the mistake of assuming that each word would have to be cracked character by character. That isn't the case.
You only have to crack the largest unit of information. That's why dictionary attacks are so effective. They can crack the entire password as a single unit because it is a single unit (word or name).
Passwords/passphrases both share the same limitations. They can be cracked fairly easily (unless they're too complex in which case they get written down and completely defeated).
The simplest solution is to tie each user to a single computer and limit the password attempts to 5 or so before that user is locked out.
Or, have a physical device that plugs into the computer that allows that person to use his password on that box (with the same 5 shot limit).
Yes, but there are phrases that are easily remembered yet are apocryphal even to those to whom they mean something. For instance "Dr. Lovibond and the frothy nipple of love" would probably mean nothing to anyone but myself and the one person that I was brewing beer with that day. On the other hand, he could shout "What's your passphrase?" across a crowded room,I could shout back "The frothy nipple band!", and I'd still defy anyone to guess what the passphrase was.
What does this button do...
Wow, that's a story to tell ;)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Suppose I make fake finger prints of "Carrot Top" or some other annoying guy and then wear glove and rob Fort Knox. While there I leave Carrot Top's fake finger prints all over everything.
Will Carrot Top go to jail?
How long has PGP been doing this, someone else mentions this and you people act like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Having phrases as passwords doesn't make it that much harder to crack since you'll have spaces (or some other delimiter) in between the words, and the words comes in a grammatical order.
that he's an MS empoyee, because what he suggested is stupid. People's vocabularies are not that extensive, so passphrases are easier to crack than they seem.
Multifactor auth is the only cure. I wish there was something available to implement it besides smartcards. Something that doesn't require a smart card reader and works everywhere, preferably something wireless within a few feet. You could do three-factor auth, even. This "something", pin code and biometric (fingerprint). That would be pretty darn cool.
A longer pass phrase consisting of correctly spelled words and a shorter cryptic password both are likely going to have roughly the same information content and are therefore equivalent from a cryptographic point of view.
subject - verb - object
(I like pizza).
Here's another:
adverb/adjective - object - verb
(Mean people suck).
The trick is finding the most common 3 word phrases (in English) and applying the basic grammatical rules you learned in school.
That guy didn't understand that passphrases/passwords are covered in cryptology under "authentication".
And any student of cryptology can tell you that PATTERNS are the problem.
With passphrases, there are too many GRAMMATICAL RULES and PATTERNS that make it simple to crack.
He focuses solely on the number of characters and never looks at how someone else would approach this to crack it.
its taken how many years to train staff that passwords as 'dog' are not a particularly smart idea? so now we'll have to explain that easily remembered phrases aren't a good idea either...
now i'm not even close to being an expert, but would translating the phrase into two different languages (say welsh and flemish)and XORing them together prior to hashing work?
yes. Please do tell the story. I hadn't thought of it that way. I was in LUM.
Lazy User Mode. ex:
prompt> Passphrase has expired.
prompt> Please* enter new unused Passphrase
prompt> ?
user> Panic!!! Quick what can I come up with that I won't forget?
prompt>?dogsnamedogsnamedogsnamedogsname....30 char limit
* my system uses Canadian English and therefore says Please.
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Yep. I first learned about it in my forensics coursework.
...
For more information on this, this Google search produced some good sites explaining tihs.
Also, in just conducting that search, I learned that 2000 and XP is apparently immune from this particular problem, according to this site.
"With LM, password hashes were split into two separate 7-character hashes. This actually made passwords more vulnerable because a brute-force attack could be performed on each half of the password at the same time. So passwords that were 9 characters long were broken into one 7-character hash and one 2-character hash. Obviously, cracking a 2-character hash did not take long, and the 7-character portion could usually be cracked within hours. Often, the smaller portion could actually be used to assist in the cracking of the longer portion. Because of this, many security professionals determined that optimal password lengths were 7 or 14 characters, corresponding to the two 7-character hashes.
But things are different with newer versions of Windows. Windows 2000 and XP passwords can now be up to 127 characters in length and so 14 characters is no longer a limit. Furthermore, one little known fact discovered by Urity of SecurityFriday.com is that if a password is fifteen characters or longer, Windows does not even store the LanMan hash correctly. This actually protects you from brute-force attacks against the weak algorithm used in those hashes. If your password is 15 characters or longer, Windows stores the constant AAD3B435B51404EEAAD3B435B51404EE as your LM hash, which is equivalent to a null password. And since your password is obviously not null, attempts to crack that hash will fail.
With this in mind, going longer than 14 characters may be good advice. But if you want to enforce very long passwords using group policy or security templates, don't bother - neither will allow you to set a minimum password length greater than 14 characters."
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
That allows you to take other precautions to find out who.
If there is a backoff, the attacker can play that to get more attempts.
Maybe a good alternative would be to send the user and admin an alert (email?) when the backoff was triggered, then backoff for 15 minutes. And each time that is triggered, add another until you're backing off for an hour between attempts.
Over a long weekend (72 hours), that can add up to a lot of attempts. It would defeat an automatic process, but maybe not a human with some knowledge of that person's life (children's names, pets, etc).
Part of security is also knowing that you may have been cracked.
User X - backoff triggered 21:00 2005-02-12
User X - backoff triggered 21:15 2005-02-12
User X - backoff triggered 21:30 2005-02-12
User X - backoff triggered 21:45 2005-02-12
User X - backoff triggered 22:00 2005-02-12
User X - access granted 22:15 2005-02-12
Pretend you have a device that when you pass through a validation point, it checks a univeral database for your password, validates it, then copies a new password to your device. If your password doesn't work at the next validation point then that means someone has stolen your password.
A validation point would be locking your home, starting your car, logging into your computer, things that are intertwined with daily life. This shortens the amount of time to discover a stolen password(key).
Credit card companies wouldn't need to have algorithms detecting(guessing) purchasing patterns and spending usages. This system would be very straight forward and ultimatly effective.
When someone has stolen a password(key), the next time the victim passes through a validation point, which could be moments or minutes away, it would be rendered useless to the criminal, because the user would be assigned a new password(key).
If a criminal were to try to use the password instantly, the next time a user would pass through a validation point their password would fail alerting the system. Same day detection. Although with an encrypted password, the criminal would not have enough time to crack the password by the time the user passes through the next validation point, which would be in the same day.
A validation point could be just a simple password change from the universal database from an access point used in daily life. It doesn't mean that you are restricted from using a device, like starting a car or locking your home(if the password failed), it is simply a way to keep the password dynamic making it constantly secure. Only when it was used to make a purchase and then failed would it restrict use.
Good system or what??
-Patrick O'Mara
------
insert sig here,here, and here
Let me tell you in California anyway.gov passwords are stupid. For instance if you are say a intern or a secritary your user pass may litterly be: Secritary and Secritary. I shit you not. They use a similer convention for posion, the public servant they work for (or loby). Now the better quesion is this: If windows is such a POS can they at least migrate to Apples with Virtual PC installed?
In the days before mp3s one password trick I used was to use music CD serial numbers for passwords - that way the object with the password can initially be near the machine without being obvious. Another trick to mix letters and numbers is food packaging ingredient lists if preservatives are listed by code number in your country. It's not that hard to get a 17 character passphrase that looks random but has some form of meaning to you if you use similar methods - just don't go for the obvious and use something based on a companies internal serial number system.
If you are using passphrases, intentionally mispel words. This would make it rather harder for someone to find your passphrase. Especially if you Mi5zp1e them enough. Don't go to far, because you might not remember them anymore.
Another trick is to have a really difficult password used as salt. Just put it in front of a simpler one every time. This would make dictionary attacks much harder.
If you just want to protect against network hacks, don't forget that they cannot see your desk, so using a piece of paper with the difficult first password would work wonders. It won't work against a determined thief, but most dictionary attacks won't be from determined thiefs. Beware of the cleaning lady though.
Just hide the power cord.
Great article.
I'm surprised Robert didn't mention the use of foreign language words as passowrds OR part of pass-phrases.
The "good thing" about dictionary attacks is that most words are in English i.e. the dictionary supplied with the trojans etc. I typically use foreign language words (no, not Spanish ou francais) as my passwords - with the usual mix of punctuation etc. These are typically words in "Roman [foreign language]" so that the word won't be an English-variant. Works really well.
(While I know the word "baqwaas@" -- Urdu for BS is just as good as "kjdsfndsf" its still easy to remember and isnt as prone - as English - to dictionary attacks.)
Biometrics can now tell if we had corned beef or roast beef for breakfast? Incredible.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Microsoft calls for password replacement because of "precomputed hash tables"? This very amusing, because it is pretty much only Microsoft who is vulnerable to these attacks. Why? they store only the hash of the password. Because there is a (nearly) one-to-one correspondance between password and hash, attackers can build up tables of precomputed hashes and use these to directly look up the passwords.
Everybody else mixes random salt bytes into passwords prior to hashing. Unix was doing this over 20 years ago. Modern systems use long (16+ character) salts that make precomputed hash tables infeasible for many years to come.
Some platforms use a better system still, that makes it more difficult for password guessers now and well into the future.
The only intrinsic problem with passwords is that people choose dumb ones, but again this can easily be fixed with a little technology
It's Symantec LC
Wow, so Microsoft has discovered how to allow long passwords... something Unix/Linux has done for years. Welcome to the world.
Yeah passphrases are great, but I was under the impression that the underlying concept is to simplify user authentication. Having passphrases 30 or 40 characters long, though easier to remember, greatly increases the impact of typographical errors. Can you imagine having to retype a 46-character phrase because of a simple typo?
Never Submit.
Now that Microsoft has invented passphrases, you F/OSS Commies will need to buy that license...
95% of them will be "ayebeeceeonetwothree"
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
If you know multiple languages, you can make it even harder for people to guess your passphrase through grammar patterns and dictionary attacks.
By combining different languages, I.E. English with Russian, or English with Japanese (romanized), or English and Spanish; you can make a dictionary attack difficult as you will remember where to apply the transition of grammar and language, but the attacker will have to guess more on where the transition of language should take place.
In addition, it will require the brute force attacker to not just load the English dictionary, but also the dictionary of another language, increasing the number of entries. And since it will be a relatively coherent sentence to you, you can still remember it. Giving you greater variety.
"I love [insert girlfriend's name]"
This guy claims that he can't tell us how many petabytes it would take to store a lookup table because *Excel* barfs when he tries to calculate a number that big?
2 627 3256603133867323648139554786902016
Guess he missed the memo: Excel is Not a Calculator
95 printable ASCII characters plus one for a blank, 42 characters long ->
dc
95 1 + 42 ^ p
1800494452733830998157610890905672303546577977
which is about 10^68 petabytes.
That wasn't so hard now, was it?
his wife has already called for no more sex...
Corned beef or roast beef hash.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Is systems with RSA keys that you swipe at the terminal, loads up your desktop (these are thin clients) and all applications necessary to do your job. It also lets you into everything you're authorized to access. This seems to be pretty secure IMO with the onus on the users to maintain physical security of their passcards and the company to make sure those who enter the building are who they are.
What are the maximum password lengths for other operating systems. i.e. OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc...
Login keys on biometric activated usb key, with variable biometric validation expiry (ie need to place thumb on usb key every once in a while, so forgotten keys would expire). Would need api tie in, but sound in theory.
Changing passwords frequently and forcing users to choose new passwords as well having way too many passwords. I'm up to about 30 for the corporate network. Some I only use once in a while and they are generally expired when I do.
Come up with a tool to help users choose a quality password and have them change it less frequently. OS X has a password strength indicator which is accessible from the change keychain password dialog box. Click the little i button next to the ? button. It will measure the quality of your password.
We are working on SSO - Single Sign On because the users swamped the outsourced help desk with thousands of extra calls every month due to passwords getting locked out. Most users have an average of 12-20 passwords with admins having many more.
SSO should reduce the number of passwords to 4-5. We will also be implementing something like an RSA hardware key at the same time, this gives you two distinct checks.
Personally, I like the idea of a USB based device that works like a smartcard. Plug it in and type a high quality pass-phrase and then you can access everything and never type another password. Time it out with the screensaver. Auto-lock everything if you unplug the USB device.
If the USB key is lost, replace it and invalidate the keys that were on it. Of course, this sucks if the device is lost and you are traveling.
IBM's running an ad with a biometric scanner built into their ThinkPad's. Now that's an idea, the user can't lose their USB key or RSA token that way, just the whole laptop!
The author of this blog makes the assertion that it's too difficult to pre-compute hashes for a 42-character password. But of course the length of the password is [ultimately & eventually] irrelevant - what you want is anything that hashes to the same 20 bytes as the 'real' password. Granted, a 20-byte hash collision is still far harder to obtain than your typical 8-character passwords, but it does limit the usefulness of ever-increasingly-long passwords.... I daresay beyond 40 characters of unicode you're just adding fluff.
Wow, this is an old blog entry. But anyways.
Passphrases do not, by themselves, help security all that much. Instead of a low number of characters to permutate, you have a low number of words to permutate. The same methods you use to crack an 8-character password can be used to crack an 8-word passphrase.
The real power, as the blog entry points out (and Windows problems aside), is that it becomes more practical to force users to change passwords (or passphrases) more often.
longer passwords.
Because your example follows the same pattern as standard English grammar.
First letter capitalized.
Ends in punctuation.
It will be mostly lower case letters.
S will appear frequently, Q, V, X and Z will not.
I will usually be capitalized.
Plus, it isn't very easy for most people to come up with sentences that have that many words and still be able to remember them. So most people will resort to popular quotations, song lyrics, etc.
I've been telling my clients that for years. mymonitorisadell is more secure than 23ljc24op anyday.
- The Google Toolbar has a spell checker button AND it works, consider that before hitting submit next time k?
...if you think the weakest link in a Windows machine is the password?
Didn't think so.
... it has most likely been mentioned on slashdot countless times ...
here for instance.
I'm a pretty fast typist. I can do about 70 words/minute if I really put my mind to it. But there's no way I want to type 30-40 characters every time I need to type a password. I use passwords at least 8-10 times a day. Screw that.
I have a 9 character, mixed case, alphanumeric, that works just fine. Hasn't been hacked yet.
My work password is also a 9 character, mixed case, alphanumeric and it changes every 90 days.
I can deal with 9 characters because I can pump out 9 characters without thinking about it. But typing 30-40 characters and accidentally hitting the wrong key and not realizing and having to type it again? Screw that.
Passwords are safe enough for what they're for. There are so many other points of failure in computer security, a half decent password rule system is more than enough to make the passwords far from the easiest point of failure.
To make passphrases work it seems we need a better UI than showing dots in response to typing. At a minimium I would think most users would want at least a show/hide button of some kind.
r3pl4ce 13773r5 w17h numb3r5
n0 0n3 3v3r 7h0ugh7 0f 7h47 B4
In soviet Russia passwords call for no more MS employees.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
A 30-character pass phrase is not the same as a 30-character password. Pass phrases suffer from the problem of predictability and dictionary attacks. Users are lazy and not open to typing a long sentence every day to gain access to their systems. As passwords increase in length, the proabability of typing errors increases. Many users are not going to put up with retyping their long pass phrase. When using a word processor, users get on-screen feedback of their typing errors. When typing a passphrase, you get a bunch of stars or nothing. No positive feedback that you have been typing the right letters. That's okay for an eight-character password; it's a disaster for a 30-character pass phrase.
signature pending slashdot approval
Loftcrack, you said?
:)
Thanks.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Is the person a member of AA? Try the serenity prayer. Don't know what their interests might be? check out their fridge magnets.
There are an infinite number of quotes, but most people will choose an easy phrase from their church, favorite politician, or tv show or commercial.
Most people just aren't creative enough to come up with something unique and creative.
If they have to work too hard to find a quote that speaks to them, many people's pride in their own cleverness will lead them to tell their best friends about their inciteful choice of password.
And at the other extreme, the rabid fans of a pop culture phrase will whine until they're allowed to use "DOH!" or "WWJD?" as their pass phrase desipte its extremely short length.
I see this as offering no solid improvement since the problem is people's laziness and herdlike mentality. It seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to standardize security departments into using a procedure that will probably be revealed to have been patented by Microsoft already.
The status quo really seems to be the only option at this point.
Shocking nonsense is to choose a memorable passphrase by constructing a grossly shocking sequence of words.
A quite mild example might be: flying turds babble incontinently
The core idea is that the shockingness makes the phrase memorable and the impossibleness makes it harder to guess since it does not represent a state-of-affairs likely to be discovered by someone else.
And because it is a passphrase you don't make it public so there is not embarassment issue.
Most of the time.
The hash of "b" is not just one byte larger than the hash of "a" (unless you have a broken hash implementation).Nope. Changing letters increases the number of variants that must be tried, but that increase is insignificant when you look at the whole process.
Take any single dictionary word (that's about 25,000 options). Even if you have 3 vowels to replace, that's still only 200,000 variants.
25,000 words, with 2 variants of 3 characters = 200,000 variants.
Meanwhile, a random 3 character password of only letters and number (26 lower case letters + 26 upper case letters + 10 numbers) gives you a higher level of entropy
62*62*62 = 238,328 variants.
Also, the phrases that you'd use follow the rules of grammar. So it wouldn't be like this:
random word * random word * random word.
It would be noun * verb * noun.
Passwords/passphrases are authentication which is a sub-section of cryptography. Any patterns indicate weakness. The more patterns, the weaker the system.
It wouldn't take that much effort to turn Bartlett's Familiar Quotations into a hash table even with the substitutions. And that would instantly crack the passphrase from your original post (""They were the best of times, they were the worst of times," / "They were the b3st of t1mes, they were the w0rst of tim3s.)
Authentication is very simple math, based upon the largest unit of information.
A quote is a very large unit of information so your quote as a passphrase would be attacked in its entirety, not by word or by character.
dumping out all of the password hashes and then cracking most if not all of those using rainbow tables and then using that as evidence you should switch to Linux!
Ok, so Windows is more secure because it supports long passwords with spaces? Wait, linux does too. So this whole point is moot as far as which is more secure. Windows fanboys need to learn that linux is more secure because it was designed that way, Windows is insecure because it was designed to never touch the internet or a network for that matter...
He's claiming that passphrases have to be cracked the same way that passwords are (brute force / dictonary).
If the user chooses his own passphrase, he won't be introducing real entropy in the misspelling and "random" character.
If it's a quote, it will be cracked as a quote with that bit of false "entropy" added. This is a variant of the dictionary attack. Quotes are easy to gather.
If it's a phrase that he just made up (but none of his examples were), then it is a bit (but only a bit) more complicated, but still subject to the rules of English grammar (this is the flaw in his approach).
It's all about cracking the largest unit of information in the key. With a quote, the key is a single unit of information.
all are short, 6-8 digits .
One of them might get into my Slashdot account, or another one might get into some other discussion group, or some other low-security level area, but where they come in handy is when I COMBINE them.
each password is a non-word, but something I can easily remember. I combine them by doubling them, or tripling them as needed, I also use 2-4 of them in a row to essential create a "passphrase" but its not made of words and its certainly not a phrase that anyone could just guess by doing some sort of dictionary attack on it.
its worked well for me and the list I printed out and hid in the house is pretty useless if someone finds it.
I can't get my wife to use this system though, she still uses the "pet" password for everything.....grrr.. another friend of mine said his dog's name was the password for everything! So of course I promptly checked his eBay account and updated his webpages for him.
I have just done a web enabled embedded microprocessor (telnet into it) but because it's on the internet I need to protect it somehow.
I use a passphrase such as "EDMONTONOILERSHOCKEYTEAM"
Now when you telnet to this device it answers you with a challenge of 15 random numbers displayed in three groups like this:
1 15 24 5 6
3 20 2 19 7
6 23 10 9 17
Now your response is 5 digits comprised of the character held in position X.
IE a valid response to the above challenge would be (picking group 1) IHMNT, of course you can respond to any group displayed on the screen.
This makes it hard for any keylogger device as the passphrase is never sent in it's entirety, only portions of it and if you were sniffing the traffic you dont know wich group of letters I am responding too.
This is good for a one time only password, if you talk to someone over the phone and want them to go in and do some tweaking you can give them the "password" and the password they just used will most likely not come up again so once they disconnect the system is once again secure.
Big drawback is you generally have to write the passphrase down in front of you so you can count what position the letters are in.
Well, he isn't actually a plagerist, but now that I've got your attention, I should point out the Phil Zimmerman has been advocating passphrases since the first version of PGP came out in the early nineties IIRC, and even he is probably not the first. I've certainly been using them for about that long wherever possible.
That won't stop Microsoft from taking credit for this "new, revolutionary idea in computer security," or the Microsoft apologists accusing everyone else from "copying Microsoft instead of innovating" when it becomes more common practice among everyone, some percentage of which will include Linux and OS X users. Nevermind the PAM modules supporting this have been around forever, or that pretty much anyone with half a brain using GnuPG or PGP has been doing this forever either.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
it's a lot easier to shoulder surf passwords when they are phrases, instead of random digits.
if I see
Xow XX thX time XXr aXX good meX to XXme to their coXXCCC's Xid, and I'm ken jennings, I can figure it out...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If this were a fark newsbreak, it would be marked 'obvious.' Longer passwords are more secure. For some reason people have been convinced to just use a single word for a password (obviously because of the term), but I'd be more worried about my employees if they didn't jump to the conclusion that a phrase can be used for a long password. But I guess forcing users to have a 12 character or longer passphrase (although we still use the term 'password') pretty much forces them to use a pseudo-phrase.
It's amazing how many people use pet names (as the parent mentioned). A network administrator at my old school (which shall remain nameless) had the Administrator password for the entire network set to her dog's names. It wasn't hard to guess :)
So.... basicly you try 10000 famous quotes with your password cracker.... If its something you can remember theres a good chance it famous enough to be put on a list.
Once you hit 13 characters or so, any nondictionary password is going to be a tough crack, massive parallel resources or not.
And I can tell you, typing a 13 character password is ruddy fast once you get good at it.
The difference between a 13 and a 42 character passwords is squat. At that point, you're in more danger of losing your password on a napkin and having someone else find it.
Also, why are LM hashes still used?
>
If your really stuck for as passphrase you could try this. http://thisistom.co.uk/flash/phraser/
On February 7th, Russ Nelson (Open Source Initiative president) published an article called "Blacks are lazy", quoted in journal entries here and here.
Please consider signing the online petition asking OSI to remove Russ Nelson.
I find Russ Nelson's commentary personally offensive, asinine, and profoundly anti-social. Probably as much as you do. But I disagree vehemently with your campaign against the guy, no matter how obnoxious or stupid he may be.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH is absolutely worthless if people cannot speak their mind and voice views, however unpopular, however disgusting, without living in fear of retribution such as you advocate. Your time would be better spent rebutting Nelson's offensive rhetoric on the basis of fact, with your own counterrhetoric, rather than trying to silence him through economic and social retaliation.
In other words, to paraphrase people far wiser than I, I may find what someone says disgusting, despicable, and vile, but I will defend to the death their right to say it (and that right must include the right to do so without fearing for your job or your professional standing, else the "right" is really quite meaningless).
Your reaction harkens back to Bush's asinine statement with respect to the fools burnign Dixie Chicks' albums after they voiced (IMHO understandable) emberressment at having Bush as president. He commented "freedom of speech has consiquences."
By that definition Stalinist Russia had freedom of speech, as did Maoist China, Khmere Rouge Cambodia, and a dozen other communist and fascist dictatorships. After all, you have the freedom to say whatever you like in those places, but your speech had "consiquences," like ending up in the gulag, at the wrong end of a death squad's gun, or out of a job and unable to feed or house yourself (the latter ever more likely here in the once-free west).
Instead of trying to ruin the guy, counter his rhetoric with your own. Frankly, if he's trying to erase all record of his commentary, it sounds like he's already rethought his position and is emberressed by his earlier writings. If this is a result of his having come to his senses and changed his mind as a result of discussion and counter-arguments, good. If it is a result of fear of retribution such as you're advocating, then I think that is a pity. As much as I loathe and despise what he said, I loath and despise the use of fear, intimidation, and retaliation as means of silencing people (and making their "right" to speek freely essentially moot and worthless) even more. I would far rather have my blood boil at the words of a fool, than have the fool silenced through fear and be looking over my own shoulder, lest I say something that offends someone else and face similiar persecution.
Please, please consider a different approach to dealing with these sorts of jackasses.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
No matter how you slice it, a plain old brute force password cracker (like l0phtcrack) won't be made obsolete by this. It's sort of a trade-off, on one hand the password is longer, on the other hand, the majority of possible characters are going to be from a very short list of 26. Consider these points:
* As some already pointed out, sentences have a regular structure, where certain types of words go in certain places. That's a lot of predictibility. Almost every normal sentence begins with a capital letter... Uh oh.
* Sentences contain lots of spaces. Words in the English language are predominantly constructed of a very small group of letters; US TV viewers would know the normal suspects as those the contestants guess on the last round of Wheel of Fortune. Repetition is bad.
* Sorry, but sentence punctuation doesn't meet my requirements for possible permutations. Most sentences use only a period, and to a lesser extent, an apostrophe and maybe a comma. There are 29 non-alpha, non-numerical characters on my keyboard.
* My users have more than just a network logon, and not all of those programs accept long passphrases. There's an added possibility for confusion.
* Users are going to do things like forget which letters are capital (oh please - they're still confused by caps-lock), whether there is a comma in some space or not, and very likely lose their place with a long passphrase if they aren't expert typists. This creates frustration, and when users get frustrated, they do things like leave the machine logged on all day (even when they leave the room). And that creates headaches for me, because it's more likely that someone will sit at a logged-on machine than walk into my locked server room, log on as admin, and get a SAM or shadow-file dump off the server.
I like someone else's suggestion, although I don't recall who it was. Make the user type his new, complex password ten times. If I can memorize 20 complex passwords, my users can memorize one.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Thing to note here is that I still suggest that you mangle the pass phrase that you're using so that it's not pure english (or any other language). As far as I'm concerned, expanding the password to a passphrase is a good thing, since it's always adding a few more bits of entropy into any brute force (or even more finessed) search algorithm.
I think that, these days, just about every modern well-designed operating system, the 'password' system allows semi-arbitrary long passwords (255 characters or more).
Hmm.. I just went and actually RTFA. It looks like Windows likes to store your password as a cryptographically weak hash, if it can, and then converts to something a bit harder. Sigh.
Oh well. Yet another reason to use long passwords -- short passwords in Window are easily recognizable as easy to crack. .
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I'm certain that everyone that I know has used passphrases, or at least condensed passphrases for 3+ years now. They are way easier to remember.
As an example of a condensed passphrase: "Yambanbm!" (You And Me Baby Ain't Nothin But Mammals!) or "i86bits" (I ate six (Tim) Bits).
Yeah, impractical, but pretty much foolproof.
I don't want to be a member of or support any organization which is headed by a racist. I know nothing about the issue being discussed, but I disagree with your interpretation of propriety.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Patents pending.
The people signing the petition are expressing their freedom of speech, as am I.
His "withdrawal" of the article is also lame http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/blacks-are-l azy.html:
In other words, he does not come out and deny that he still believes his point that "all things being equal (ceretis paritus) blacks will work less hard than whites" - just that he put his arguments forward lousily. He also doesn't consider that to be a racist position (probably because he believes it to be true for the reasons he cites, but, again, no proof to back it up when asked to).He also backdated the retraction to make it look like this is old news (the article was originally posted earlier this week - February 7th, 2005 (which is a Monday) to January 1st (the supposed date of the "retraction") was a Saturday, not a Monday.
Not very honest. Or do you also object to my calling attention to this further dishonesty and/or stupidity in backdating the retraction, because it interferes with his "freedom of speech"?
--
If you ask them to come up with a passphrase then they'll come up with a phrase. It's almost that easy.
Of course, we'll soon end up with crack dictionarys containing things like "Natalie Portman with grits", but it's still a lot harder on the crackers than 'password7'.
I'll still strongly suggest that people throw in a few random special symbols, since that will help throw off most dictionary attacks. (I.e. "Natalie Portman(8) 4 gr!ts")
I think that some Security geeks figured out that a random english word is worth about10-15 bits of entropy (randomness), but if you tie them together into a proper english phrase, then you can easily see how the successive words will have way less entropy to them. Adding or substituting other characters and/or words helps to break up the pattern and add back entropy.
Of course, you'll then have to remember how you mangled the passphrase, but that's the nature of entropy. Check my password page for a better idea of what I'm talking about. It was written for an 8 letter password world (Solaris), but the full phrases can work in a more real world.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Is there anything Google can't do?
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Why would anybody do such a study? Even if it were undeniably true, they'd be crucified by the likes of you. Anyway, you ought to read what he actually said - he was blaming a misconception about blacks on the practice of slavery, to make a point against racism. It seems you didn't read that far before you became blinded with self-righteous rage, and now, based on one poorly-understood out-of-context rescinded statement, you want him fired. How is that not prejudice?
It's even worse - he backdated his retraction, not by a month and a half, but by more than 4 years. Google still has a cached copy showing a posting date of February 7th, 2005.
There isn't much of a difference between a ten-character password and a ten-word sentence except that the "character" set is larger, and not really by that much. Let me explain:
;)
The average adult has a vocabulary of about 20k words, and actually uses much less than that on a routine basis. Let's be really generous, though, and assume we are dealing with highly literate people with a vocabulary of, oh say, 65536 words.
What you just implemented is a 16-bit character set, and your ten-word phrase is computationally equivalent to a twenty-character password in the 8-bit extended ASCII set.
You can complicate things by making it case sensitive, but I have a feeling that would be more trouble than it's worth with the average end user, who can't be relied upon to handle consistent capitalization. (Scroll up and down through the comments for pertinent examples.)
But it actually gets worse than this. Whereas a ten-character password consisting of random characters has no internal structure, natural language phrases and sentences do. Consequently, if you want to build a brute force password cracker for phrase-based passwords, you can save yourself a lot of time by checking the set of grammatically correct phrases first. After all, "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party" is a lot more likely to be someone's passphrase than "sniffle upchuck defenestrate furry therefore pretense macro recoil lemon beyond". It's no objection to say that a formal grammar for English won't match everyday use; you can just use something like the SEQUITUR algorithm to build an approximate real-world English grammar from Usenet postings, the Wikipedia database, or Google.
In other words, all this extra effort accomplished was to convert a ten-character password into something a bit less secure than a twenty-character password. Or, in the real world, where end users will be using things like five word passphrases, you get something roughly equivalent to a three-character password.
That this idea was proposed in the first place is a perfect example of mistaking data for its representation.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The company I work for has a password policy like this:
1. Must contain at least 8 characters
2. Must contain at least 2 lowercase letters
3. Must contain at least 2 capital letters
4. Must contain at least 2 numbers
Here is an example of my Windows Server 2003 administrator login (local only, not going to help you). "Rent is due on the 5th". Now I see many comments already talking about how that is so much harder to type than "34erdfCV" but I beg to differ.
Just a couple of problems with "Rent is due on the 5th"
8 letters? check.
2 lowercase? check.
2 capitals? fail.
2 numbers? fail.
that humans are capable of using (that is, they can remember and type them) is approximately the same as the number of pass phrases because phrases contain common words. If every pass phrase was replaced by an abbreviation ("Mary had a little lamb 88aapzF" -> "marhalilmb88aapzF"), there would be a pretty low number of collisions, and abbreviations would be usable as short passwords that are just as good as the phrases they were derived from. Therefore this idea produces nothing but an increased amount of typing.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The rest of his post is a red herring. It's a ramble about historic racism, which does not support his contention that, today (or even at any time in the past), blacks are lazy.
Also, his original post came out earlier this week (Monday). He's backdated his retraction to January 1st, 2001, to make it look like this is "old news", and not something he wrote a week after being appointed president of the OSI (opensource.org). If he has the freedom to mislead people, then certainly I have the freedom to call him on it.
--
PGP has had big passwords for years, with a little sliding "security" scale to indicate how worthy your nonense is. There's a lot of prior art, IOW. It does seem a bit naive to suppose seven English words (more or less) are uncrackable, though. There are a number of ways to eliminate pass phrases altogether, such as CTC encryption using AES and a USB flash card full of random junk.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
1: take 2 words
2: put them together
3: l337'ify it.
Example:
ViewSonic
\/][eW5()n|K
hard to crack, easy to remember.
Back in High School, I was in a computer science class. I had a long pass phrase - something along the lines of "For me, GNU is not Unix." Or maybe longer. I remember that from time to time, people would see me type in my password. They would ask me things like "Josh, how do you remember that long password." To which I'd snidely reply "Don't worry about it!"
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
First it was 6 letters, then alphanumeric, special characters, 8 letters, now words built from initial letters of a sentence. This is not going anywhere. We have to use USB tokens.
Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm sure IT departments will have no trouble getting non-technical people to type out 57-character long phrases every time there's a need to authenticate. And I'm sure they will have no trouble getting these people to use different phrases for everything. And I'm sure it will take at least 3 weeks before products come out that make it easier to authenticate to these multiple systems and completely defeat the purpose of the extra security.
Passwords are the problem? No. No they aren't. The problem is the nature of people. Longer passwords don't fix that problem. You have to make it EASIER for the user to authenticate (not harder) and still improve security over short passwords.
Some mentioned biometrics. This is a solution that solves the 'people problem.'
A further problem with passwords sent over the wire is that they are vulnerable to timing attacks. By checking the timing of packets containing password keystrokes, it is possible to reduce the amount of randomness even more. I don't know of any software actually doing this, but it may become a problem in the future.
A better approach is to use a password protected RSA key. The key will not be as vulnerable to theft, and you avoid having to send the password over the wire. Using ssh-agent along with an RSA key protected by a long passphrase is probably the best solution, unless you move between computers a lot.
There is still the problem of revealing passwords and passphrases to compromised machines. I don't know how to deal with that. I suspect that a combination of passphrases and secure hardware (trusted computing style) will be able to ensure that there is no single point of failure.
Anyway, I'm not sure that what you've got now is insufficient; it's probably fine. However, the best available practises are quite a bit stronger than what you are doing now.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
It bothers me that few people seem to be appreciating that a 4 or 5 _word_ passphrase (as given as examples in the original article) really doesn't have much entropy at all.
Robert points out it contains capitalisation. Yes, the first letter of the first word of the sentence! And also that it contains punctuation - grammatically correct punctuation, thus so predictable as to hardly register!
He then goes on to claim how amazingly secure these 20 or so character long strings are. But in fact he's now counting in the wrong units - its number of words that matter, not characters. To crack his examples, all it takes is a different approach. It would take a dictionary (online? there's enough of them!) of common words and some simple grammatical rules and you could begin to brute force pass-phrases. And then it comes back to the old obscurity rules - made-up words, random punctuation, etc.
I admit it could work for a while, but if the world adopts this in a year's time there will be computer scientists (and linguists) the world over wowwing everyone by guessing their passwords.
Public key cryptography does not necessarily mean using hardware tokens. Key exchange protocols use public key algorithms without hardware tokens or public key infrastructure by seeding the key exchange algorithm with a password. If the client and the server's passwords match they have a strong shared secret for the session. If they don't - no information has leaked.
These methods are immune to sniffing and offline dictionary attacks and don't require long passphrases to be secure. You just need a password that can't be guessed in the number of attempts allowed by the server.
Examples of such protocols include Bellovin and Merritt's EKE and David Jablon's SPEKE. The Stanford SRP algorithm is related. These methods have been around since 1992. Unfortunately, all of them are patented and none of them is in widespread use. The patent status of SRP is unclear as it may infringe the EKE patent.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
You mean etching the fingerprints on those poor (but yummy) souls? My WTF-0-meter explodes at the very thought...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Whoever you're authenticating with can 0wn your fingerprints too, whereas with some sort of RSA smart card, you have to actually have that card or break into it, not just passively authenticate it, in order to create a duplicate card.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
security is measured as a ratio: security of "item" = value of "item" / cost of breaking security to get at "item"
Now, suppose we use public key encryption. You put your public key on the machines in Wisconsin and Alberta while you're physically there, and you copy the server's public host key to a laptop. Assuming that the laptop is secure (it has shielding and you've had it in your briefcase which hasn't been out of your sight), there's no way anyone can misrepresent you to the server or the server to you, unless the servers aren't physically secure, in which case you're always hosed.
Go back home, put the server's host keys on the machine you'll use to log in, then connect. At this point, either you or the server will abort if anyone attempts any sort of spoofing, yet nothing is ever sent over the wire which could be used to re-authenticate you later.
The costs of breaking this system are:
- Have a quantum computer that scales (which don't exist, AFAIK, but maybe you can bribe your way into area 51): several billion dollars to priceless
- Gain physical access to the servers. Again, probably takes a lot of money to bribe your guards (everyone has a price) -- I'd guess billions.
- Get your personal private key. Tempest attack in your house, break into your laptop, etc. Tempest will cost quite a bit, but your house is probably reasonably secure (physically), so it costs money to find your house, more money to break in, and still more money (and luck) to steal your key without you knowing.
So, the point is, like a real safe or vault, people aren't usually going to get in by tunneling or dynamite, but more likely by getting the combination from a cashier or whoever.
As for the passphrase idea, it's great for local security, but I wouldn't trust it farther than I trust VeriSign online, and I don't trust any company that makes over $100 a year of pure profit for any "secure" domain. Last I checked, the way you use passwords online is by hashing them, so all you really have to do is sniff the hash and hack the client software. Has this changed?
And, for that local security, I prefer physical security. No one's breaking into my house, and no one's taking my laptop out of my hands.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Microsoft password hash tables are WEAK why?? 2 reasons, firstly, they use one salt only for all password hashing i.e. password FRED123 will hash to AAAFda3 EVERY time, where as with Linux there are (Dependent on algorithm used) there are 4096 different hashes that could result, now your precomputed table has to be 4096 times the size. Secondly the microsoft hash table stores 2 versions of your password. 1 the normally hashed relativly safe version and 2 a truncated to 8 characters in 2 4 character block _UPPER_ _CASED_ LM hash for "backward compatability". This second hash is not only easy to precompute, (reduced character set 4 character passwords, single salt) it gives a great stepping stone to the main password!
My passwords are all around 20 characters, except for certain web services that LIMIT me to 8-10. But, they aren't passphrases, so to speak. They are pseudo-phrases with random l33t in them, that I eventually learn so well that I don't consciously think them anymore.
It's not that l33t is so incredibly great, but it's a pneumonic, and it's unlikely that people will g|_|3ss >ac7ly whic|-| c0nven7ion I used where.
Plus, I can type them all very, very fast now. My xscreensaver times out password entry after 5 seconds, and I only need 2 unless I make a typo, in which case I can usually go back and re-type it before time runs out.
The real question is, should I be changing them more often than a few times a year? I'm thinking maybe, because I use some of them on my laptop. No one is going to be able to shoulder-surf me effectively -- without a slow-motion video camera.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm sorry... but did a Microsoft employee just poopoo password security using the argument that rainbow tables make them obsolete? That's absolutely hilarious. Brute forcing of passwords using rainbow tables (e.g., rainbow crack) is only feasible today when passwords aren't salted. Microsoft's LanMan hash system doesn't bother salting (or doing a bunch of other things that would be wise from a security perspective). If Microsoft had bothered to implement a halfway decent password storage system, then their users wouldn't be nearly as susceptible to password cracking as they are today. There's a reason for salts and nonces, people!
By the way, for those of you managing WIndows networks, make sure that you turn off the LanMan hashing system. Disabling this will do a lot to prevent a compromise of one single system in your network from turning into a cascading compromise of everything. N.B., this is only practical when you don't have Win9x-based OSes on your network, but those don't really belong on a corporate network anyway (easier said than done, I know).
All this being said, you have to be careful to not go too far with password security. The bad guys always go for the weakest link in the chain. If the hash and password strength requirements are too difficult to reasonably break through off-line cracking, then the bad guys will just get the passwords through keyboard loggers or inserting trojan shims into your password and authentication systems. After all, grabbing the password hashes is only practical given administrator access, so you have to assume that a bad guy can install a keyboard logger, too.
If you ban passwords in favor of PKI smart cards, biometrics, SecurID, one-time-passwords, or the other really complicated and expensive solutions, you still haven't done a great deal. The folks advocating these systems are either ivory tower types with little foundation in operational reality, or marketing droids trying to sell you something. Once again, assuming a bad guy already has administrator access to a system, he can wait until you authenticate to another system, and then take control. Remember, you are not authenticating to the remote server, you are allowing your workstation to authenticate to it. If you assume a potentially compromised workstation, then your fancy shmancy authentication system that cost you a bundle to implement just became almost as useless as passwords.
If you want to keep the bad guys from stealing or subverting your authentication mechanisms, then you're going to have to prevent the bad guys from getting onto the systems in the first place, including all of the workstations. Looking at yet another monsterous list of critical vulnerabilities released last Tuesday from Microsoft, it's pretty clear to me that Microsoft hasn't done a great deal to prevent successful remote attacks when they sold their software in the first place.
I'm not sure why he was taking so many jabs at Linux. Well, okay... I know exactly why but this seemed especially odd to me since I have disallowed passwords on all my computers unless the user is sitting at the keyboard. And that is mainly because I haven't got X to work with one time passwords yet (besides... how would I calculate them without being able to run the program to generate one?).
I use s/key or opiekey (depending on OS) for ALL my remote logins. Both of these programs use a pass phrase but (even better) this pass phrase is never transmitted across the network... encrypted or not. What happens is the pass phrase is used to generate a one time pass phrase.
In practice it looks like this:
ssh localhost
otp-md5 498 la7365 ext
Password:
I then open another window: type in
opiekey 498 la7365 ext
Using the MD5 algorithm to compute response.
Reminder: Don't use opiekey from telnet or dial-in sessions.
Enter secret pass phrase:
type my passphrase at the prompt and it spits out:
GIG DIRE EGG HISS HUB COOK
I type that at the password prompt and go on my way (cut and paste between xterms is best here). Even if I was not using an encrypted protocol the password is useless once it is used. You can even hit enter once so the phrase will be echo'ed back to you on the screen so you don't mistype it. Doesn't matter if someone reads over your shoulder because GIG DIRE EGG HISS HUB COOK will never work again.
Next time my password might be:
KNEW LARD ARGO LARD BARE YOGA
Or whatever. The point is that it is a mixture of pass phrases with the ability to avoid sending your pass phrase over an untrusted connection. You can even print out a list of the next 10 pass phrases you will have so you can log in from a computer where you wouldn't trust it enough to run the opiekey program.
How exactly is this an insecure linux system, at least in regards to passwords?
lol, besides that... I think pass phrases are a good idea. Just a little anoying at first.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
That be L0phtCrack - http://www.atstake.com/products/lc/
Work on memory retention. My memory has been nicknamed a Big Bull Elephant.
For those that have poor memories you can work on them. There are many memory techniques to induce improved short-term and long-term retention.
I don't write down passwords.
using any passwords with Microsoft products is futile. Passphrases cannot change that. Use any system designed with security in mind if you care.
Passphrases have low entropy per character, but
it can be *known* entropy. I'm thinking of systems
like Diceware. Make a list of 4096 words and pick words from it at random, using e.g. dice. That gives 12 bits of entropy each time you pick a word. Repeat until you have the required number of bits.
I guess this may not be what many people understand by passphrase. But it should be easier to understand than a password of the same quality.
I remember Microsoft Bob used to log you in anyway if you failed your password more than three times. If that's not giving up passwords I don't know what is.
Gummi bears defeat fingerprint sensors
I wonder how long it will take for them to patent the idea of using a PHRASE as a password. Or, the idea of having longer than 10 character passwords. Sounds fun.
So, pick a treshold length. Password of 4 chars is almost immediately crackable. Password of 6 takes days. Password of 10 is practically uncrackable except of dictionary attacks. So require the user to give 6-letter password, but store 9-char one, with 3 chars randomly generated. Get the login process to crack - brute force the remaining 3 characters at each login. The user doesn't have to worry about a lengthy, difficult password, the cracker has to run attack against non-dictionary, full ascii range one. Simply make the password verification process more computationally intensive. Delay of 1s at login time is nothing. Delay of 1s between tries of dictionary / brute force attack is deadly for the process.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
No redundant neologisms please.
Enter new passphrase:This company sucks
Invalid passphrase: Must end in '.', '?', '!' or ';'
Enter new passphrase:_
What's changed?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Windows NT, Windows 9x and Windows ME
Windows NT, sure, but Windows9x and Me have no security anyway.
One method I tried to use for password generation for a time was to have one master password that is used for everything, but to combine it with some kind of identifier for whatever it is that the password is for and hash the result. As much of the hash as possible is then stuffed into the password field using some kind of encoding (but must be careful that the encoding doesn't limit the number of combinations too much!). This way I can afford to have a longer password because I only have to remember one password, but that password isn't spread around.
Of course, there are lots of problems with this. The first is that if your one password is compromised then everything is compromised as long as people can figure out your identifiers. Another is that lots of systems require periodic password changes, making your identifier just like another password. Finally, you generally need software to help you compute the hash to enter, which makes it difficult to use for passwords used to log onto a system in the first place, as you can't run software yet. (of course, entering your master password into that system would be stupid anyway.) The latter flaw is what made me give up on the idea, although that could have been mitigated if I had a PDA or some other portable device which could do the hashing.
Normal practise to generate short passwords
(i.e. under 10 characters) is to invent some
sentence, make some words uppercase if your language does not do it for you. Use the
starting letters of the words (or every 2. or 3.)
and mix some digits and symbols in between.
Writing whole sentences does not make sense as
1) each word adds only a few bit, so a 30 characters long sentence is a insecure as a 7 character passwords onyl containing letters.
2) long sentences take much more time to type and
opportunity to misstype. And when you type slowly or multiple times, others might easier get it.
Using passphrases does not add much more entropy, although they may be easier to remember. They are still prone to sniffing, 40chars can easily be packed in a single ethernet frame. Could some one tell Microsoft to use encrypted connections?
Users hate passwords, they hate typing them, and they hate having to remember things. They will always opt for whatever is easy. They will hate you if you set a lower limit of 30 characters, and their passphrase was 28.
Passwords or passphrases - same thing - will be chosen easy the more obstacles you place on the users: Requiring users to change password every three months will leave your systems less secure:
Users will choose easier passwords, and/or they will rotate just two different passwords. No security gained.
Further, in the race with a bruteforce attack, nothing is gained unless you change your password to one that has been tried.
In stead, as the administrator you have a head start in the race with the crackers. Go password cracking and require users to change their password when it has been cracked.
If password is cracked too quickly it should be followed by disiplinary actions as a compromise of security. Ofcourse the users must be informed beforehand of such proceedures.
Just my 5euro-cent contribution...
I currently use Keepass for remebering all my passwords. All I need to remember is 1 master password. Currently it is 16 charachters and includes more than just letters and numbers. I use it mainly for message board passwords, IM, email, websites, etc. Plus it's open source so you should be ok unless you have a keylogger installed.
But biometrics are important. Eventually, security will converge to encryption keys / certificates stored on physical keys (tokens), accessed by some biometric (such as a fingerprint) and a password.
As a previous poster put it, something you are, something you own and something you know. This provides the greatest degree of security. For this system to be compromised, the theif must steal your biometric data, your physical token and your knowledge. For the user, it feels no different than using a password with the possible exception of slipping in your token.
The major problem, of course, is that of loosing your key (token). Personally, I like the idea of a 3-way raided token. Leave one with your computer, put one in a safe and keep one with you. Anytime you access your accounts you put two of the three tokens from the stripe together and you can access the data in the stripe.
As someone who has both worked in Internet security and had serious physical and electronic fraud committed against him, I can tell you these issues are not a joke and something indeed does need to be done.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
English only has about 2 bits of information per letter.
Therefore a passphrase of 40 characters gives you only 80 bit of information, or 10 bytes of information.
UNIX used to keep the hashes publicly readable so non-privileged programs could check passwords (xlock), but this was abandoned years ago. On Kerberos, the password hashes are even stored on a separate authentication server.
Technically, the hashing is still done so that a privileged user would not be able to extract another user's password, but as in most machines the privileged user also has full access to everything else (in particular he could intercept the password in transmission) it does not matter much. In practice, when you can get at the authentication hashes you already have full access to the machine.
Also, dictionary attacks can be easily thwarted using the "salt", two bytes of random data that is added to the password before it is encrypted. So each password corresponds to thousands of hashes that you all have to store.
If you do not have the password hashes, the only way to break a password is trial-and-error, and most systems limit password entries to one every few seconds.
Network sniffing attacks are not limited by the length of the password, but by the length and complexity of the encryption keys which are randomly generated. Successful attacks on encrypted communications usually happen when these keys are chosen too short and not randon enough (WEP).
The truth is that even a simple password is relatively secure, and people touting complex password rules do so because they read 10 year old books.
Well, except if you use 20 year old software...
personally, I'd rather not use any 'security measures' that encourage the bad guys to cut off my body parts. retina scans? they pluck out your eyeball. finger print? they cut off your finger. at least with a passphrase, all they have to 'encourage' you to do is write down the passphrase for them.
mirrormirroronthewall,amistilltherichestofthemall?
or maybe:
thatgoddamlarryellisonshouldneverhavemoremoneythen me!
So whatever happened to the argument that using English language passphrases was a lousy idea because the average entropy of an English sentence is very low (I recall something like only a couple of bits per word, but it's a pretty weak recollection so don't quote me).
The worst part of the argument is that it also shows that the "take your favorite song lyric and substitute first letters for the words" password technique is lousy. ("Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, Who'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me" = WM,WM.WcaWMwm?) On the one hand you have all those wonderful lyric servers to start with. Then you have that the words aren't randomly distributed in a sentence, and even if you're too impatient to crack words at a time, the distribution of letters of first words in the English language is also really stacked. (yes, I know not everyone out there speaks English, but if a cracker has targeted a site, they can make a fair guess at which language is being spoken most prevalently).
90% of consumers will use...
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
All our windows machines could have just blank passwords, even for the administrator. Heck, we wight as well just have replaced all those mainframes and UNIX machines before the Y2K bug and just used Windows with NO passwords.
Man just think of all the viruses, trojans, worms, malware, adware and phishing scams that we would have been protected from. Plus rather than sending our IT resources to India we could have fired half our staff when we eliminated passwords and had everyone just be local admin! What a concept!
Your Average Joe
I've been using and encouraging the use of phrases ( as passwords ) since about 1991 ...
So short passwords are better than long passphrases?
Well let's see if you can brute force this.
"This is an uber-r4ndom s3ntencE. Try to cracK it."
So if we have say, 6 bits per character, and we have a 40-characters passpharse, what do we get? 640bits! That's 4 times larger than a SHA-1 hash.
The idea here is not how vulnerable passphrases are, but how stronger they can be COMPARED to simple passwords. By just changing ONE letter to a number, dictionary attacks can be foiled.
If Micro$lug thought of it, it can't be a good idea.
they spelled l0pht crack wrong. also it's just called LC5 now.
_> _
Hm... I don't see why the renaming will change anything. If one wants 4096 bit encryption to be safe one needs to use a pass* 512 bytes long and anything less will compromise the overall strength of the encryption scheme used (using more is not necessary.) Now most password hashes are based on SHA-1 and thus any password larger than 20 bytes will not help you much. So updating the base hash to use newer version of SHA like SHA-512 will increase things to 64 characters. Anyone dealing with security knows this but the problem is obviously joe doe that usually don't give a poop and is not using any password at all, and with auto login. Home users is not a problem but corporate users are and corporations need to teach good security practices. Until CEOs and other upper echelon inhabitants realize that computers are not just point and click or that operating an office suite is the end all and be all of computing this lack of security will profuse all bussinesses. In the end the corporations with the worst security measures will "die" because of this hybris, and I say let them because it is their own ignorance. No matter what OS people use security should be taken a lot more seriously than it has so far. I have exposed flagrant security breaches in my years dealing with computers and it is baffling to see how little "normal" people understand the power of computers. Obviously this post will as all my previous posts be rewarded an entire 0 points and my karma will bleed like a woman after PMS. But hey I am not a after points... nor status... Just trying to convince myself here that we don't have too many Microsoft cronies working covertly at slashdot.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Lets make the passord a little longer and call it a pasword! what ingenuity from Microsoft! This is pure genius!!! I think not!
That's precisely correct, but the nice thing is that those 10 bytes are "pure information". In doing the compression you've eliminated all of the redundancy, and you're left with a truly random number.
Therefore, a brute force attack would require 2^80 guesses, which is on the number-of-the-atoms-in-the-universe scale.
A lot of protocols tend to use 128 bits for security, but that's partly a matter of overkill and partly a matter of 128 bits being a nice number for the power-of-two based computer to work with. Any attacks on them are based on weaknesses in the encryption algorithms, not on the key size.
Eighty truly random bits is likely to be more than sufficient.
Just install Password Safe http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ and generate a new, random 20 character password (Hash That!) for each login. If you don't like Windows-only software, there's Password Gorilla http://www.fpx.de/fp/Software/Gorilla/ (runs everywhere), My Password Safe http://www.semanticgap.com/myps/ (Linux/Qt) or pwsafe http://nsd.dyndns.org/pwsafe/ (command line).
Don't forget to use a good, long passphrase as the database's Master Password.
lol windoz
With quotations, there are even fewer items (even including song lyrics), but people tend to get the exact phrasing wrong (not to mention punctuation). So they would be about equal.
But the only real way to tell would be to deliberately capture the passphrases/passwords of every user in several different companies over a period of about a year.
I work at an insurance company and the people here mostly use insurance terms for their passwords. So that would be another way to reduce the scope of the search. People use words and phrases that they are most familiar with.
In the biomedical environment we often wear latex gloves for extended periods. Our hands sweat and we get prune fingers. Prune fingers do not work as biometric ID. So we have to wait several minutes (up to 20 minutes) to log on. Interestingly the middle finger of each hand works best. In the mean time our low-IQ IT group has mandated minimum 8 character passwords for those without fingerprint scanners which MUST include lower and upper and "special" characters and then after 15 minutes of no activity the user must relog with their password. All in all a pain. And no I don't have to come up with a better solution but how about needing to scan a series of 3 fingerprints. OK that's not a kazillion combinations but it could work.
Why not use multiple passwords? like pass 1? pass 2 pass 3?
if you dont match all three, access denied... if you mispell one, it'll ask for it again. but if you fail it a second time, it wont tell you, and ad nauseum.
with that, plus biometrics, It's gonna be really fucking annoying to hack into peoples' accounts, even if they intercept your biometrics data. they still have to figure out three passwords you can still change. and your identity online, when it comes to online accounts, can change, thus, if they were targeting you again, they'd have to know you changed accounts and are the same person. (it's easy to disappear online)
Funny to see such post coming from a M$ employee - an Operating System (???) aimed at providing user-friendly features aimed at low IQ users (idiots) and pointy-haired bosses. How the heck are they going to remember a 42+ char passwd, let alone type it every time!!! There M$ guys should stick to making sh!tty programs bought from smaller companies.
Incase anyone read my previous comment you may wish to look at this: /etc/shadow file for 3 user accounts fred,jane,john all having password abc123 set.
fred:$1$IWCWzozx$MdJcLJ.RTg5tZXJlLHiH71:12827:0:99 999:7:::
jane:$1$P0EOTtBA$1LP2mfJw9IxX6OKlIuJ12/:12827:0:99 999:7:::
john:$1$7CAXAlzP$n.BEUaIRqAMbUhU6ShSqN/:12827:0:99 999:7:::
A dump of a similar set of 3 users from a windows XP box: (used utility pwdump2.exe)
fred:1006:78bccaee08c90e29aad3b435b51404ee:f9e37e8 3b83c47a93c2f09f66408631b:::
jane:1007:78bccaee08c90e29aad3b435b51404ee:f9e37e8 3b83c47a93c2f09f66408631b:::
john:1008:78bccaee08c90e29aad3b435b51404ee:f9e37e8 3b83c47a93c2f09f66408631b:::
note all 3 store 2 hashed passwords (the first being the weak LM variety) and MS only uses one hash.
What's really wrong is the "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality of software designers to the use of passwords.
Passwords should protect things. The trouble with so many passwords is that they don't because their use is too trivial.
If you have something to protect, you will take steps to think about whether a) it's being protected and b) if the level of that protection is high enough. If, however, you are forced to provide a password to every little thing as part of your daily life, your ability to think effectively about those two things is eroded since you start getting a completely false sense that just because you provide a password for something, it's safe and secure.
So - I say BAN ALL PASSWORDS unless there is a rock-solid reason for having something password protected. Why do I need to authenticate to my office network, then authenticate AGAIN to my intranet, then AGAIN to the timesheets, or to my email etc. etc.
Software designers need to use password authentication as a last resort, or make it an option for users so that they can think about the aforementioned things properly.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Yeah, amazing huh? It's got something to do with that 'Back door" they were talking about a while ago.
For biometrics to work, we'll all have to wear gloves. All the time *except* when we giving the bio. Either that, or we do a lot of polishing.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
It looks like they're just using the usb device as storage for one's keypair. Proper USB tokens, if I understand correctly, do all the encryption on the device and never divulge the private key. As such, they may be used with untrusted computers.
Thinking about this - I wonder if biometric security gets good enough that it becomes too difficult / expensive for most criminals to hack will it lead to an increase in assault and kidnapping?
I imagine life could get quite hellish for that segment of society that is rich enough to be worth targetting but not rich enough to afford a team of bodyguards.
Why doesn't the software/program (IANAP) doing the authentication restrict the amount of times that the password can be entered? Say 10 entries every 10 minutes or similar. And also institute a time delay factor, like there must be a 2-3 second delay between attempts. That would be sufficient leeway for any typos but would seem to me to make a brute force attack unfeasible.
Obviously since this doesn't happen in the real world there must be a good reason. (I mean I know this is implemented for physical input by users on networks, ATMs etc. but why doesn't it work generally and against cracking programs specifically?)
Anyone care to point me to a good explanation?
Ta
I read your journal and these recent comments by you. I don't understand your personal vendetta against Russ Nelson. Most of the problems with the article have been addressed by people like Marxist Hacker 42 and he does a pretty good job of explaining what is going on. The article is not racist.
You seem to be unable to come to grips with the fact that you have gone overboard. The whole thing started as racist, and then you begin to saunter over to 'lack of facts' and 'backdating' the post as reasons to continue.
I see no reason to continue this pointless attack against Nelson. It is quite obvious that he had no intention of being a racist/bigot/discriminatory, but merely addressing somethinofteng observed in society. Retracting the article and backdating it is obviously one way for him to avoid all this unnecessary attention drawn to him by the likes of you, for NO GOOD REASON.
Clearly, it was poorly written without regard to citing sources, facts, etc. Nonetheless, it is quite clear from the text that he had no intent to be racist. Your entire argument/campaign against him, then, is built upon something that does not exist. It is people like you and your overly-political correct friends who are so quick to pounce on others for anything related to race/sex/religion that many studies that would be beneficial to society crawl to a halt.
You clearly have a hard time accepting the fact that your original notion was incorrect. You should take this opportunity to start learning how to lose gracefully.
... and ...
Contrast this with Nelson's reply to them on the same list
He fails to realize that, if we're looking at a teapot analogy, the teapot is him, not the article, and the teapot is already showing cracks. He
I was at an MS security seminar last year, the chap evangelising (Steve Reily?) on stage was really pushing pass phrases, so I find another MS staff member pushing the same idea interesting.
I actually tried pass phrases, I was considering proposing letting staff choose between shorter complex passwords with more frequent changes, or less complex, less frequently changed passphrases.
I couldn't find a way to have multiple password policies in AD so I gave up trying.
If you have aggressive workstation locking, phasephrases are a pain and will slow you down.
Some days when, fingers and brain are out of sync, or using an unfamiliar keyboard, I had to slow right down to get it right.
This is a risk imo, albeit not a huge one.
Also, you do get more login failures and this will affect helpdesk calls and could promote false positives on ids systems.
I still use passphrases, but only on system where I don't have to login very often.
Ultimately, keystroke logging and people writing stuff on post it notes can undermine passphrases as easily as passwords.
I really don't see how you and those supposedly closer to the subject are still misinterpreting his words. It's quite obvious to me at least, that his poorly written argument was along the lines of:
1. all things being equal, based upon economic theory of leisure/work tradeoff, etc. we can infer that black people are less likely to want to work as hard (meaning much/time) than a white person
2. the tradeoff is different for them b/c of existing practices that cause them to have lower wages
3. were they not to receive lower wages then, the theoretical disincentive would no longer exist
Now, based upon the way I see it then, he's never saying, "black people are lazy bums." Sure, you can take the words and twist them to mean that, but the overall gist of the entire entry seems to be that which I have just outlined.
I will concede that perhaps backdating the entry is questionable. But, at the same time, you do have to admit, that it may simply be a product of this storm that may have pressured him into something he didn't really want to do.
Actually, looking at the source material you provide, I think this quote summarizes best:
"Mr. Nelson's attempt to justify the perception that black people are lazy is evidence of his own ignorance to what the modern problems of racisim are." He's attempting to justify the perception, not actually claim that the perception is correct. There's a huge difference. The latter is racist; the former is not. He may be ignorant about the modern problems of racism, but that certainly does not make him a racist.
I have used sentances for a while now, but converted them into elite speak. Or 1337 sp34k
Key is to create a sentance and a consistant version of leet. Like this
The quick fox jumped over the lasy and brown dog
becomes
7h3Qu1ckF0xJump3d0v3r7h3L4zy4ndBr0wnD06
try cracking that. Easy to remember but hard to crack. Not to mention if you create your own 1337 style
That is my imput, but we will see the replacement of conventional passworlds within the next 5 years I think, and an additional 2-3 years after that to sort out the starting bugs.
"all things being equal" means just that - same wages. Therefore the "theory of leisure/work tradeoff" doesn't hold in such a case (never mind that the theory doesn't hold in actual practice either, as the counter-examples I gave show the theory is seriously flawed, but that's another discussion).
Here is the actual statement:
That's pretty unambiguous. And a blatant slap in the face for a lot of us. It's also a lie. Prefacing your core arguments with such a lie pretty much kills off your credibility.As for the backdating issue, he's the one who created this particular can of worms, and if he backdated this because "it may simply be a product of this storm that may have pressured him into something he didn't really want to do", again, this speaks directly to his fitness (or lack thereof) to be president of the OSI.
On the issue of whether he is actually a racist, racism comes in many forms. He may be blithely unaware or some of his personal biases, or just unaware of what racism is in today's context. At the very least, though, he is, as one person said, a loose cannon.
Most of my pass"words" are really phrases anyway.
Here's the easy attack for that.
You compile a "dictonary" of a few thousand quotes, lyrics, etc.
For each string in the dictionary, you brute force 3 random characters through how many positions are in the string.
This is better than just having the 3 random characters, but not much better.
Imagine a password composed of 20 slots, all of them the letter "a" except for 3 random characters in random slots. That wouldn't take much to crack at all.
Now, instead of just the letter "a", you'd have a dictionary of quotes, which would take X times longer (X being the number of quotes in the dictionary).
If it takes 5 seconds to run through every possible permutation of 3 random characters in random locations in the example with all "a"s, then it would take about 5,000 seconds to do that with a dictionary of 1,000 quotes.
5,000 quotes is about 25,000 seconds.
10,000 quotes is about 50,000 seconds.
The time is increasing linearly instead of exponentially. This is bad.
It's even worse if you consider that adding numbers/cApiTalizaTioN is very low in entropy, thus, very easy to crack.
Passwords/phrases are, by their nature, of extremely limited usefulness.
He'd have been far better off advocating simple passwords/phrases, BUT having very rigorous, automatic policing and analysis of login attempts / failures / successes and limiting login attempts, alerting people when logins fail / succeed, etc.
If my passphrase is "cats&dogs", it is easy to crack.
Unless the cracker only gets 5 attempts before the account is locked for 15 minutes.
AND an alert is sent to the user and sysadmin.
AND the user is required to change his password every 4 weeks to a unique one (variants of past ones are not allowed).
Nowadays I generate strong passwords using Roboform, which also remembers and enters them for me. Comes with a Palm app that allows you to carry around passwords with you, and generate strong password when you're away from your computer.
But let me get to the key point on my post: show some respect. People are not lazy just because they lack memory skills. Or the patience to enter a 30-character password every time they access a secure web site. Fine, it works for you. Doesn't give you any moral superiority.
And I'll say it one more time: we need non-Password authentication. Means redoing our ID infrastructure, but we need to do that anyway.
Because I'm a REALLY CRUDDY approximation of the average adversary. My incentive was "get stupid project over as quickly as possible", his is "gain access by any means necessary". How many highly-paid staff are you going to detail to this password-cracking project, which extends onward, indefinately? How many man-hours go down the hole? At best, and I mean at best, I spent a week of the company's money securing sixty people against the dumbest rung of script kiddies for another sixty days (password reset) -- was that a good use of anyone's time? An interested adversary would have owned the heck out of probably half of those users. But few organizations have the resources to pay very expensive people to constantly imitate an interested adversary.
Its MUCH more efficient in terms of engineer-time and corporate management to establish a policy equivalent to whatever resources you were about to throw at the cracking, and possibly code (once!) a verification against that policy (i.e. check when password is set that it doesn't appear in your dictionary and isn't within the bounds your white-hats were about to brute-force check).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
passphrases seem like a good idea, but it was brought up that attacks would just search for words instead of characters. so how about using a random character to seperate words instead of a space " "? ex. "RootbeerxIsxThexBest"