Slashdot Mirror
Study Shows "Secret Questions" Are Too Easily Guessed
wjousts writes "Several high-profile break-ins have resulted from hackers guessing the answers to secret questions (the hijacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account was one). This week, research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, will show how woefully insecure secret questions actually are. As reported in Technology Review: 'In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.'" Schneier pointed out years ago how weird it is to have a password-recovery mechanism that is less secure than the password.
Secret questions are only less secure than passwords if they tell you the password right away. But if they reset the password and email the new one to a pre-specified email account then just guessing the answer isn't enough; you'd have to have access to the victim's email account too.
This doesn't really work that well if the password is actually for someone's email account, though.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Unfortunately, many sites require you to set up a secret question for password recovery. Disabling that facility is actually desirable if you want to enjoy the strength of password security.
Not only that but when I have used them I've found them annoying as they're often case sensitive and it's easy to forget what you entered or how you entered it. What is your dog's name? Which dog? What is your date of birth? What date format?
They're just bad all round, often the questions you get to choose from either fall into the category of far too easily guessed/socially engineered such as where were you born which 90% of people you've ever met can tell from something like your accent or where you work and live if you never moved away or they fall into the category of being too ambiguous such that when it comes back to remembering how you entered it 3 tries will probably get you locked out.
Creating a list of questions that truly are secret and of which at least one is common to everyone is near impossible. You could start asking things like "Who at your workplace would you most like to sleep with" but I don't think most people would want to answer such intrusive questions!
Who the hell else would know that?
Every other web site that you visited that asked that question.
Hence, rendering the whole facility useless, and causing you extra inconvenience.
Disabling an insecure security feature is not an inconvenience.
Well, that's clever, everyone should do that. I'll have to teach my grandmother to write perl scripts, then remember what she called it, where she stored it, and how to run it everytime she is asked one of these retarded questions. Oh, and also how to save the output to her gpg file after remembering what her gpg file was called and where she stored it and what its password is.
If you (presumably) guard your passwords carefully (in this same gpg file?), why do you even bother saving the answer to the "secret question"? Just type a bunch of random keyboard characters (bang hard, using the opportunity to release the pent-up frustration), don't save it, and be done with it. Isn't that faster than going through the perl script rigamarole?
For most things - various user forums, etc. - I don't give a damn about all this password/secret question paranoia. If they crack it, so what? I haven't changed my slashdot password since day one, its easy for me to remember, and if someone cracks it and "steals" my "identity" here, well, I would probably find it amusing.
There are a relatively small number of things, such as bank accounts and trusted access to other people's networks (and yeah, my servers' roots) whose passwords I protect very carefully. Almost none of those things involve extra secret questions in case I forget the password, or if they do I've give a gibberish answer I don't save.
(OK, I have a CISSP cert, and those hyperparanoia-filled meetings I have to go to to keep it up sometimes make me want to scream).
So, it seems every slashdotter is submitting his best SHA1 fancy trick to answer the security question. But I think you missed the problem. The problem is not securing the accounts of smart tech-savvy people, as they should already know how to do it themselves. It is "how do we make sure that Joe the Plumber, Granny, and Sarah do not set dumb-ass security questions leading their account to be pwned in less than ten seconds?"
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault