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."

Comments

Not alone

[bsane]

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

Re:Not alone

[TheRaven64]

I don't know about Gentoo specifically, but on most *NIX systems the convention is to put the default values in the example config file, commented out. This shows the user what the defaults are, and shows that they don't need to be explicitly stated.

Re:Not alone

[PAjamian]

It's not just Solaris, here's part of /etc/login.defs on a Gentoo box:

# Number of significant characters in the password for crypt().
# Default is 8, don't change unless your crypt() is better.
# Ignored if MD5_CRYPT_ENAB set to "yes".
#
#PASS_MAX_LEN 8

# If set to "yes", new passwords will be encrypted using the MD5-based
# algorithm compatible with the one used by recent releases of FreeBSD.
# It supports passwords of unlimited length and longer salt strings.
# Set to "no" if you need to copy encrypted passwords to other systems
# which don't understand the new algorithm. Default is "no".
#
MD5_CRYPT_ENAB yes
Old DES crypt() hashing is only significant to 8 chars on any system. That's why modern systems (including Gentoo) use MD5 hashing by default which has no limit on the length of the password to hash. Notice that MD5_CRYPT_ENAB is set to "yes" above which causes it to ignore the PASS_MAX_LEN setting.

Re:Not alone

[Cygfrydd]

# Ignored if MD5_CRYPT_ENAB set to "yes".
#
#PASS_MAX_LEN 8
...
MD5_CRYPT_ENAB yes ... which seems to indicate that the default behaviour is to ignore the password length cap altogether.

@yg

Re:Not alone

[ATMD]

I'm running an up-to-date Gentoo install, and have never knowingly touched that file. I just tried logging in as root, except typing only the first 8 characters of my password and then garbage. It didn't let me in.

Re: same in the default install of solaris 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Same problem in a default installation of Solaris-10 as well.

Re:No way.

[__aaclcg7560]

Nope. At some companies I worked for, the most common passwords are "password", "hockey" (I have no idea why), and "yousuck" (Windows machines). The opposite extreme is companies with password Nazis who insist that your password be a certain length, follows a certain pattern (capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols) and minimum length (eight or more characters), must be changed every 90 days, and you can't reuse the last 500 variations of the same password based on your name.

Re:Ditto NT4. Sort of.

[kestasjk]

I think you've mixed something up.

The Lanmanager hashing system breaks the password up into two 7-char sized chunks, converts them to upper case, and hashes each separately, and XP still uses Lanmanager hashes if you don't explicitly tell it not to (by changing a registry setting).

The first 14 characters are still used in Lanmanager hashes though, so this is only a security hole if the attacker can access the hashes.

Flat Out Wrong - Read

[madsheep]

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.

br/>
A few test cases to pay attention to:

1) Sign up for an AOL mail account https://new.aol.com/freeaolweb/?promocode=814322&n cid=AOLAOF00020000000602

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 :)

Re:Nothing new

[sglider]

MySpace has that issue as well, past 10 characters. If you go to their signup screen, you can sign up with a longer password, but if you go to the secondary login screen, it will stop typing either after 10 or 12 characters.