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Spafford On Security Myths and Passwords
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent blog post, Eugene Spafford examines password security along with related issues and myths. In particular, he discusses how policies that may not necessarily make much sense anymore end up being labeled 'best practices,' and then propagated based on their reputation as such."
I still think changing passwords periodically is a great idea. Even just to keep some cracker on his toes or incase you accidentally wrote it down or devulged it or typed it in the wrong field and is in clear text.
You have a more secure system if it's harder to use a password when un-authorized. Especially if the user is an Admin account.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
We all know that its stupid. People write it down on post it notes etc. But when the luser gets hacked he is going to be gunning for the sysadmin who needs to be able to prove that he is serious about security so that he can put the onus back where it belongs.
Thats just how politics work in a corporate environment. People will cover their arses first, do the sensible thing second.
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Monthly change policies. they are simple stupid. If your password is inherently weak, such as your car number, date of birth etc., it will be easy to crack. If you throw a monthly change policy at such people they will change their passwords to simple things. Other option is to educate them to choose good passwords, but that works with half the people. Best solution, let the users not choose a password. Let the machine generate random passwords. Then the user can choose out of those random combinations. At a place where I used to work, the web login system on internal network was set this way. You would click on a button saying, choose new password. Many options would appear and you choose one. If you dont like any of the options you could keep on generating new ones indefinitely. The change policy was that after 1 year you had to get a new password. Perfectly sane and secure. In those random 6 lettered words, sometimes easy to remember combinations would appear, like y1pl3t. Remeber it as yiplet!
If you dont have the benefit of a machine generator and want to specify something remembrable dont be too obvious. For example you have a poodle named fido(If you do I doubt you would be readingMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I worked at a company that rolled out increasingly stringent password policies. It got to a point where the passwords required upper and lower case characters, numbers, non-alpha numeric characters, and (this is the kicker) were required to be changed every few weeks.
I asked around, and gradually discovered that most of the people I worked with had ended up (after months of dilligently trying to adhere to this policy properly) had begun writing their passwords down at their desks.
Writing. Their. Passwords. Down.
It's like this well intentioned security policy had short-circuited itself and put the company in a position far worse than it had been before the reforms. None of the people involved were bad, in fact, I worked with a fine bunch of people who really cared about security and individually had great ideas for making the company safer, but when they were all implemented simultaneously: Ka-BLAM.
A security policy cannot be a list of best practices, it has to be a designed holistic plan that takes into consideration the very human nature of the people it is protecting.
Passwords are like toothbrushes; change them every three months and don't share them with your friends.
With that said, I'd like to argue the point made by the article about periodic changing of passwords. He gave the (not so) hypothetical situation of a password being typed in a login box where someone might see it. This actually happened in my high school, and then we had the admin password to every computer in the lab. And had that access until the last of us graduated. While periodic password changing won't protect you from a serious hacker, it will save you lots of grief from more petty mischief, especially if the person who has your password is clever enough to not let you know that he has it.
I tell this to every sysadmin that turns on 100% of the annoying features of enforced password change policies:
"You have to balance security with convenience."
Otherwise people will just circumvent your security by changing their password twice (or 10 times), resulting in the same password they started with, or just write their password down.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Doesn't anyone remember the 'pass phrase' thing from awhile back? You know - less complex but much longer passwords, so they're secure but easy to remember? "The quick fox jumps over the lazy brown dog" type of thing (though that should probably not be allowed :)
Just please, NO biometrics.
You ever wonder why password fields don't echo the actual characters back to the screen?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
From a comment I just made on Spaf's blog....
I've mandated rotating passwords before. My thought was that I knew my users shared passwords over time (oh, I need to use your computer for a few minutes, but your screen is locked) so by forcing a change I was hoping that if a person left the company they wouldn't retain access to anyone's accounts. However, the better solution in that case would have been termination for people who shared passwords and/or forcing all users (only about 15-20 in the company) to change passwords everytime someone left.
And of course, there are times in larger companies where I simply got told by those higher up that passwords would be rotated.
Not reading TFA is like not bothering to unzip, not bothering to point at the porcelain, just letting go in your pants.
Sure, it saves time, but everyone gets to see the big old wet patch.
Seriously, what's more important to the company: people logging in as another employeee, or actually having employees with morale!
Who cares if people use the same password. I've worked in a hospital where everyone shares passwords, and in a lab where everyone's password was the same. (Won't say where, but it happens everywhere)
There's nothing worse than a stupid nerdy geek telling people off for following some geekhole paranoid rule that has only minimal risk in real life. Like the telltale at school who takes all the rules literally, without trying to understand their purpose and the spirit behind them.
Yes, I would fire people for that. I'd fire people for any intentional violation of corporate policy. It's one thing if you don't know, it's another if you choose to break the rules, especially after repeated warnings. I've often found that people who break little rules will ocassionally break big ones - like those kids in school you mentioned, those who tell little lies will from time to time tell a whopper.
./er trying to insult someone and having to pull from his own life example of being that poor little geeky kid that nobody liked....
It's an issue of trust, not to mention security (why bother with multiple user accounts at all if people are going to have access to all accounts anyway?).
Being able to trust your employees leads to them being able to trust you (and yes, vice versa, I'm aware of that implication). This in turn creates an atmosphere with good employee morale.
There's nothing worse than a
Another useless rule of thumb is the one that locks you out after three unsuccessful login attempts. It was based on the theory that the authentic user would be able to remember the password within three attempts.
In reality, with passwords being case sensitive and people having to remember dozens of passwords for different systems at work and personal web sites, three attempts will end up locking out numerous legitimate users.
Caps lock is on... one failed attempt. You turn off caps lock and enter the password for a different system... another bad attempt. You think your bad attempt was due to a typo, so you re-enter the same password... you're locked out.
With so many people getting locked out, either they become lax with the password-reset procedures, allowing an intruder to take advantage of that. Or they stay strict, which results in numerous users losing hours of productive time.
Give 10 or 20 attempts, dammit.
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Well, since Rainbow tables are a form of parallel computing (since separate processors were likely assigned different sections of the character space), or could even be thought of as a multi-lingual database. Those were just examples of different "power and resources brought to bear" (Rainbow tables being a fairly hefty resource to bring to bear, though largely useless against SSH keys, for now). Obviously 3 bad login attempts aren't going to do anything in this situation, but what about the case where you don't have the NTLM hash yet? Why go to all the trouble of grabbing an NTLM hash when the system is likely set up with username of adminstrator and a blank password? Wouldn't you at least check that first?
IMHO, I think a relatively-small artificial delay (after a certain number of attempts) should slow down the "brute-force" attack significantly as well...
After all, let's say that it has an artificial delay of 1 second after every 5 tries. Most human-entered attempts won't even notice the delay (and even if they do, it's a relatively minor inconvenience - much more minor than having to contact someone about unlocking the account after 3 unsuccessful attempts).
But a brute-force attack that would send, say, 1,000,000 passwords in quick succession will take at least 50 hours, or over two days. Not very practical. Especially when it may take more than 1,000,000 tries (assuming the password was set up to deliberately avoid things such as dictionary searches and things like that).
Not only that, but those two things (after how many "attempts" to have the delay, and the delay itself) could even be tweaked based on how much abuse the site is getting. Maybe a 2 second delay after 3 failed attempts, which would be even MORE effective (approx. 7.7 days if my calculations are correct) than a 1 second delay after 5, while only being slightly more intrusive for legitimate users.
I think you're absolutely right with this. It would be more secure, and I would applaud it and implement it myself where possible if that sortof added security were available...
It's just because of "habit" of typing my passwords that I memorized most my passwords by pattern. (as I often don't think anymore when I type about each what each individual finger is doing but I still type quite well.)
Just look at nearly every keyboard or input-device; the F and J have some sort of deviating surface to identify the position on your keyboard by touch. ("touch-typing"). On numerical input-devices you always have the 5 standing out. Which is a convenience which helps you orientate on your input-device, but as you pointed out it's a security risk as everything has such a standard "lay-out" it's possible to get to know passwords by observing not what, but how one enters a password. (this reminds me to this program which could capture passwords by "listening" how one entered a password)
It's a problem, definatly. I think authentication via eID's and other smart-cards are a plausable sollution, but it's kindof creepy privacy-wise. (and those can be quite easily stolen. And for the signature you again have a PIN... back to start.)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
The author is a professor in the CS department at Purdue. At the beginning of 2005-2006, Purdue IT announced that they were going to require *every* password on *every* computer to be changed every 30 days. They made it clear that this policy was not restricted to administrator accounts, and in fact it has been pointed out in several articles that students will have to remember to change their passwords during summer and co-op sessions, or their accounts will be disabled. You also won't be allowed to re-use passwords for six replacement cycles. The policy isn't enforced yet but will be "real soon now."
s sguidelines.cfm
This policy seems to be generally seen as idiotic by students, faculty, and staff. The IT people who talk about it seem to be made to "toe the line," and make up excuses about how this policy went through all the review/administrative processes. Nobody has an explanation for how this policy will be made practical for all the alumni and external accounts which might be accessed only a few times a year.
Many people see this policy as a copout response to the multiple security breaches in the past several years. On multiple occasions the whole university (30K+ studenets, plus faculty/staff) received orders to change passwords immediately because some database was compromised. Rumor had it that one database was storing passwords in plaintext because of incompatibility between hashing mechanisms used by different systems. Rather than take responsibility for and fix their security breaches, they are simply forcing this policy on everyone.
I suspect the author wrote this article largely as a condemnation of this policy.
Here's the link to the Purdue password policy: http://www.itap.purdue.edu/security/procedures/pa