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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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Apple's OS X had the same problem until 10.3. See Apple KB article
> So that's the same as in most (all?) Linux distributions by default.
Was that a question or a statement?
No linux distro that I have used in the past 8 years hashes only the leading 8 chars of a pass phrase. Even so a strong 8 char password is still a strong password (eg: *_Jilt3d) or even better with non-printable chars.
... thus pretty much ensuring that you write it down.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Do you really think the type of people who use AOL would use a password longer than eight characters anyway?
That's ok, I logged in and changed it for you. :-)
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.
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.
So that's the same as in most (all?) Linux distributions by default.
Not since some time around 2000 when all of the major distributions switched from DES to MD5 authentication. Some major Unix vendors do still have the issue, though.
It changes authentication from something you know to something you have.
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
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
Well, a strong 8 char password cannot be "relying on the part after the eighth character to make it strong", as it only has 8 characters.
Now those are people who do not understand the way people think. Mathematicians, not psychologists.
And they are the reason social engineering works so well.
People like having one, maybe two or three passwords.
So instead of making them change passwords regularly (and do note the analogy of having to change your front door lock every two months!), make them create one relatively secure password and drill them to memorize it, never, ever reveal it to anyone and never ever write it down.
Changing passwords does not affect their crackability in any way, anyway... it is a random security layer which can close the door to someone who has already cracked the old one, in which case your security sucks anyhow.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Something you have on a post-it note, stuck to your desk underneath your keyboard.
Preferably, one would just write down a hint, of course. And not on a sticky-note on the monitor.
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!
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.
Under the keyboard? That's a rarity, mostly they seem to be stuck to the monitor.
Slackware still doesn't have PAM, thank god, but does use MD5 by default.
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.
The opposite extreme is companies with password Nazis who insist that your password be a certain length, follows a certain pattern
I've seen ones where they specify things like 'must be 10 characters long, contain 2 symbols, 2 numeric characters, 2 uppercase'. They don't seem to realise that they are actually *reducing* the complexity of possible passwords.
If a cracker knows that a password *will* contain, eg, 2 non-alphanumeric characters plus 2 numerals plus 2 upper case characters and the required length of the password this reduces the search space significantly.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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...
I find that picking out just something around the desk and using it's serial number (or some other long sequence of random letters and numbers) as your password, you'll never forget it as long as you know what thing its on. Not so good, however, is when someone notices that you're looking at the back of your computer speakers everytime you log on.