Slashdot Mirror
AOL's Embarassing Password Woes
An anonymous reader writes "AOL.com users may think they have up to sixteen characters to use as a password, but they'd be wrong, thanks to this security artifact detailed by The Washington Post's Security Fix blog:
"Well, it turns out that when someone signs up for an AOL.com account, the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL's system, however, doesn't read past the first eight characters."
This means that a user who uses "password123" or any other obvious eight-character password with random numbers on the end is in effect using just that lame eight-character password."
It's nothing new, the BT Openworld webmail system had this unique bug/feature years ago. Wonder if they've fixed it....
Solaris (up to Solaris8 anyway) has exactly the same problem, I wouldn't be surprised if its widespread on older systems.
One thing I find interesting though, way back before the internet was well known (1990 or so I think) and people paid for CompuServe or AOL or whatever, I had a CompuServe account and the original password was 'wrote*admiral' and it definatly required all letters to be correct
Anyone else having a hard time believing this?
"the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL's system, however, doesn't read past the first eight characters."
So that's the same as in most (all?) Linux distributions by default.
This is not that unusual.
We switched to a new content management system and gleefully informed users that their new default password was (an organization-standard eight-character string) followed by their username.
We realized something was wrong when someone noticed that all the password hashes were the same.
(The fix: find a new better hash function.)
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I think this got mis-categorized.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Me too!" :^)
No, whats really embarrassing is mis-spelling that very word in the title of a Slashdot article
Same problem in a default installation of Solaris-10 as well.
I *still* cringe to this day when someone asks for computer help and it starts out with "Well, when I log on to my AOL..."
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
That's the same password I use on my luggage!
I guess this means that AOL has gone from "sucks" to "blows"?
I can do this one better. I signed up for some game known as MapleStory a while back, submitting the password "DaedAEcarECel40s".
I quickly found that I could not log on to my account. I was wondering whether I misspelled my password or something, when I noticed (while reading the FAQ) in small print "Passwords must be 8 characters or less." Now, no warning of this was given anywhere on the sign up form.
In shock, I realized what the issue must have been. Sure enough, trying to log on with password "DaedAEca" worked like a charm.
Yes, not only did they not warn the user that there was a maximum on the password length while signing up, and not only did their form accept my 16-char password, but it actually would not let me log in with the full password. Man, I was pissed and confused for a while...
I believe the original RFC for radius only looked at the first 8 characters. It would not surprise me if AOL was using a tried and proven radius solution, and never bothered to update. I'd be interested to know the results if one was to choose a long password and then
1. Log into AOL and only use the first 8 characters
2. Log into the AOL webmail and only use the first 8 characters.
This may indicate if the limitation is the sign in solution, or the entire userdb backend.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
It's worse than they make out. Back in December 06 I posted a synopsis of how the password hashing on AIM works. They ALSO remove all the 'weird' (read: non-alphanumeric) characters. So your "eight characters" may actually be only six or four - since it cuts the password down to eight before it removes the weird ones.
;)
They also don't hash passwords anymore in your registry from AIM6 onward. They encrypt them, but that's a lot easier to get around than hashing.
If you really want a more detailed explanation you can take a look at the 12/29/06 and 12/30/06 posts on this page - http://tsourceweb.com/ - but what I already mentioned is the crux of the issue. (We all know people on Slashdot dont like to read articles anyway
For random passwords, I guess 8 characters are still OK, but it's worse if you pick "smart" combinations of words and numbers, like "computers4life" or "jennifer2007". With dictionary attacks adapted for these lengths, they'd only need to check for the first 8 and it would be "computer" and "jennifer" in this case. If you further adapt the attack to only look for e.g. ratios of 4:4 with first 4 being a word and remaining 4 being random, and so on for 5:3, 6:2, 7:1, and 8:0, you also catch circumstances where users have picked passwords like "love4u2007", which would be caught in the "4:4" attack as "love" + "4u20". Maybe that's still secure enough, but this sounds a bit risky when using word passwords, even when mixing with numbers to avoid dictionary attacks, especially with this limitation.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I got to the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and I noticed this same problem. Anything after the first 8 digits of the password is ignored. So "lawlpewpew" is the same thing as "lawlpewpewLAZERBEAM". I emailed the IT tech support people asking them about it, but all I got in reply was some default, automated response. In the end, they didn't do anything to fix it either.
Apple's OS X had the same problem until 10.3. See Apple KB article
Do you really think the type of people who use AOL would use a password longer than eight characters anyway?
At a certain university, this was also the case.
The flaw in question seemed to apply only to a web mail client which they are in the process of phasing out in favor of an open source solution, which is pretty interesting because it's the first I've seen which has support for S/MIME.
Presumably, the older system will be brought off line soon, as the flaw has been known for some time.
When signing on in front of people who didn't know about the flaw, it was fun to make them think you had a password in excess of thirty characters.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
NT4 broke a 16 character password and separately hashed the first and second parts so you could attack them separately. This is why passwords > 8 characters were recommended. Better than TFA, and (thankfully) fixed in NT5.
Worth remembering if you still have any NT4 servers in production.
The latest AIX 5.3 has this same stupid limitation too. It's driving us nuts at work cause we authenticate to Active Directory which supports long passwords, but AIX only cares about the first 8. Ridiculous.. We had to purchase SpecOps and force AD to limit to max of 8 so that users would be forced to have a unique password everytime. We contacted IBM and they said they had no plans on fixing this.
...exactly what I thought was happening all along. I've only recently broken free of AOL Dialup and Broadband, and I suspected that this sort of problem was at hand. Is AOL working on fixing this at all? It'd be good to know.
I believe I encountered this last year when I was trying to set my wife's AIM account up on her iChat client. She has been typing the long version of her pass into the AIM client, which apparently wasn't reading past those first 8 characters. When we tried it in the iChat client, it kept spitting it back out as being incorrect. We eventually had to change her pass to a shorter one to get it to work.
The fact that DES passwords are 8 characters long and anything over the first 8 is silently ignored is well known.
Am I alone here in remembering the old slashdot? It used to be IT stories for IT professionals and hobbyists. Now it's dumbed down stories for help desk wannabes.
Whats next? A story on how the letters look weird with the caps lock on?
AOL management must make the same assumptions about AOL hackers that the rest of us do about AOL users.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
At school, back in 1998, every Linux distro we installed used to have that limitation, a limitation in the encryption routine, and a rationale something like a longer password being easier to crack. It would not surprise me if AOL were still using Slackware 2.0 ;-)
I seem to recall several adventure games from back in the day (Sierra and/or Infocom, IIRC) had a similar parsing problem with text commands. Of course, they weren't nearly as severe as this password problem. And in fact, if you knew about them, they made typing things in a whole lot easier...
Reminds me of that Mitch Hedberg joke:
"You know when a company wants to use letters in their phone number, but often they'll use too many letters? 'Call 1-800-I-Really-Enjoy-Brand-New-Carpeting.' Too many letters, man, must I dial them all? 'Hello? Hold on, man, I'm only on "Enjoy." How did you know I was calling? You're good, I can see why they hired you!'"
RIP Mitch
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Unselfish actions pay back better
First, this article is flat out wrong and I challenge you to try it yourself. The AOL service will only allow up to 8 character passwords for e-mail related items. My password for my AIM clients has always been greater than 8 characters and I *cannot* log into anything without typing the entire password. This includes any web-based service at *.aol.com (primarily controlled by my.screenname.aol.com). I am a bit perplexed at where this article is getting its information.
n cid=AOLAOF00020000000602
:)
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A few test cases to pay attention to:
1) Sign up for an AOL mail account https://new.aol.com/freeaolweb/?promocode=814322&
Notice it only allows you to choose a password that's 6-8 characters, just like the AOL service itself. So now try and login with your password that's 6-8 characters, but add a few more. It lets you in right? Ok, so do this... reset/change your password now. Click "Forgot my Password" or whatever the link is called. Go through the questions and set a new password. Oh wait, notice it only lets you pick a 6-8 character password.
What does this mean? It means for AOL-service based/AOL-mail based accounts, they only allow 6-8 characters for the password! Who cares if it accepts extra characters. There is a 6-8 character limitation. It's absolutely irrelevant that it accepts additional characters.
They seem to be confusing this with AIM-only based accounts, which allow up to 16 character passwords and DO NOT allow anything more or anything less than the *EXACT* password. Try it yourself. If my AIM password is "pCv921!$z" it will reject me if I put "pCv921!$" and it will reject me if I put "pCv921!$z44". This is not that big of a deal and certainly isn't embarrassing. This is flat out a difference in AOL's mail-based system vs. AOL's AIM-based system.
Want to know a big shocker about AOL's mail-based system that they didn't figure out and report on that *is* embarassing?
These AOL.com (mail-based) and AOL-service based account are *NOT* case sensitive. That's right, try and make your password with some uppercase letters. It doesn't make a difference if your 6-8 character password has uppercase letters or not. It doesn't recognize it! I didn't check but I don't believe it recognizes special characters either. So your character set is a-z0-9.
Chew on that. Steven
What exactly about AOL isn't embarrassing?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
It's for a duck!
MySpace has this same defect/error/bug/"feature for the young memory deficient" as well... Their passwords aren't case sensitive and only read X characters no matter how many you type... And you wonder why people are always being phished/hacked...
i've seen the same sorta thing with myspace,
one my pass was autofilled, then i typed it a second time after and hit enter.
i got in fine.
I wish someone would fix that issue in VNC so that it required more than eight characters. That seems especially bad and worth fixing, but nobody has done it yet.
Please, if the slashdot community is going to complain about how stupid password limits are, can someone fix the open source projects that have the same issue so that we can't point and laugh at that too?
You're an idiot. 'password', the eight-character segment that actually counts, is extremely common.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Hello, this is AOL tech support... we have lost our database for user names, your account will not function unless you give us your account name and the first 8 letters of your password for confirmation... Maybe I'll ask for credit cards too...
lol: You see no door there!
Any obvious 8 character password [plus arbitrary crap]. Please notice that 'password' is 8 characters. Are you really so dense or just picking nit?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
When I was your age, we had to change our passwords twice a week, and we damn well liked it that way!
Official versions of VNC from AT&T and later RealVNC had similar password limitations, though I can't remember if it was 7 or 8 characters. All I know is that it gave me a good reason to switch to UltraVNC, which used the native login API on whatever OS it was running.
I've had an aol account since the mid ninties, I don't really use it anymore, but the password's only 4 characters.
I wonder how many other people have 'older' aol accounts and haven't changed their passwords.
The old 8 character limit for crypt() passwords has nothing to do with sending them over the network. It has to do with how crypt() used DES to produce a one way hash function. DES encrypts in 64bit chunks at a time. The password you enter that gets fed into crypt() is fed in as a block for DES to encrypt. A 64 bit block, with 8 bit characters, yeilds what??? An 8 character password.
Simple as that.
Spelling checker anyone?
There are many other service providers that have this stupidity. Like in India we have SIFY NET which is having same problem, its reads only first 8 chars of password.
A comment on the article page says Amazon has this crappy truncating problem too...can anyone verify this?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Seriously. AIX was the first thing I thought about when I read this story. I mean, I feel like we could expect this from a security-hokey operation like AOL, but AIX? I mean, fine, you're an IBM product that people [like/HATE] and are a [admirable/FOOLISH] attempt to make your own OS instead of just using a legitimate one, but you're at least PRETENDING to be a *NIX, so why can't you handle a password longer than 8 letters? It BOGGLES THE MIND.
Old text adventure games were often like this. You'd type in an entire sentence, but the computer would only look at the first three letters of the first two words. I remember using "drink white paint" to drink the whiskey. (This was back when the final resting place of outdated computer games was not the $10 bargain bin, but rather having the entire source printed in a computer games magazine so people could type it into their Apple II.)
I think that Infocom, being the class act of text adventures, didn't suffer this "feature".
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Another popular passwords were (Unfortunately that might need to be Are!)SEX and FRED.
Look at your keyboard and you will see why.
LOL, back in the day, like 6th grade, my friend came up with a brilliant password. "Just use password!" he said, it's so obvious, no one will ever guess! Gone are those idealistic times...
Also, I double checked - at least ./ isn't case sensitive :)
Real VNC 4 has this same problem. One of my clients uses it and set the password to a 12 key entry, with uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and a special character. Too bad most of his non-alphas were at the end...
With MySpace you can have a password such as "Password123*&%". To login, you only need to use "Password123". Obviously their system does not recognize the extended characters at the end?
Kickass Cheap Web Hosting
We have a client that specifies a 9 char password for our machines in the field. Yeah that extra char really matters. I just type the first 8 ... because I CAN. This is for QNX 6.3. Used to be the same for Tru64 I think. Debian Etch is ok, just tested it.
This has affected all the servers at the Executive Office of the President of the U.S. for a lot of years; since the conversion during the G.H.W.B. term.
A wonderfull thing it is.
The most secret plans of G.W.B and R.C. and the DoD are offerred nightly to the world (even the massuse of Condi - she perfers girls), however, she uses a "body double" for the calling.
Toodles
Nothing see here, move along.
At least it's a serious upgrade from the 6-character passwords AOL used to limit their users to.
"Those who think they know everything are of great annoyance to those of us who do." - Isaac Asimov
And in OS/400, passwords aren't case-sensitive. Nothing like reducing your search space dramatically!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
People still use AOL? For heaven's sake, why?
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
Do you really think the type of people who use AOL would use a password longer than eight characters anyway?
Sure, plenty of folks have dogs with names longer than 8 characters.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The quote:
This means that a user who uses "password123" or any other obvious eight-character password
note that there is no reference to a section THAT COUNTS, the entire password "password123" was in QUOTES, as in "password123", and therefore, as it is the SECTION IN QUOTES that was emphasized by the author, indicates that the password in question is "password123" not "password". And it doesn't take a degree in math to note that "password123" is 11 characters long.
Think twice before you post. Once would be an improvement.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Why the hell is AOL not outsourcing their job...Its better they dont do it....Its just too sad