Slashdot Mirror
Strong Passwords Not As Good As You Think
Jamie noticed that Bruce Schneier wrote a piece on a paper on strong passwords that tells us that the old 'strong password' advice that many of us (myself included) regard as gospel might not be as true as we had hoped. They make things hard on users, but are useless against phishing and keyloggers. Everyone can change their password back to 'trustno1' now.
If your computer is hacked than you're boned.
Seems to me that the solution is to have a strong password and keep your computer free of malware.
Is that really so hard?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Yes! Now i can change my password back to password!
surely we should all be changing our passwords back to "Joshua"?
I wouldn't expect that anyone smart enough to come up with a strong password would be dense enough to somehow expect it to be immune to keylogging. However with the number of brute force methods out there for cracking weak passwords, I don't see how this in any way reduces the value of strong passwords on systems where passwords are critical.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I advise people to use unusual sentences as passwords.
For example, look at the previous sentence.
It contains uppercase letters, lowercase letters, spaces and punctuation.
It's easy to remember, and hard to guess, so users are unlikely to forget it/write it down.
And even if you did write down your sentence/password near your computer, people might not even guess that it was your password.
Biometric authentication.
No problems there!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
So because something that's good against brute-force attacks, but isn't against phishing and keyloggers, we should stop doing that? Phishing and keylogging are a result of strong passwords. So you need to implement adequate measures against those instead of saying strong passwords are useless.
If users have a hard time remembering their passwords, train them in it. Using phrases from which you take letters of which some are substituted with letters are very easy to remember for a user, yet very hard to bruteforce because you can make them quite long easily.
But maybe it's just the summary? I'll go RTFA right after this, or at least skim it. But since phishing and keyloggers are only two threats, and people can still guess passwords (or brute-force them) I think I'll keep using randomly generated passwords.
"Wrote a piece" apparently means "wrote a sentence" because all Bruce said about the paper is that it was "Interesting", then he C&P'd the abstract. Why not link directly?
Okay, I read the first page of the paper and they say you only need about 20 bits of password so long as there is a three strikes policy in place. However, this ignores the type of attack where a remote hole allows retrieval of a file, and that hole is used to retrieve the password list. There are also other attacks which would allow one to get ahold of your encrypted password, not least by sniffing, which can then be brute-forced without having to worry about three-strikes policies.
In other words, keep your complicated passwords, they are still necessary to defeat dictionary attacks. Security is not something you can buy in the store, it is a mindset that you must adopt. The more factors of security, the better. If you can't memorize a complex password after using it twenty or thirty times, you should start playing memory games or something. Even I can do that and my memory is poor enough to be a liability (and always has been since childhood.) We're all different and excel in different ways, but you owe it to yourself to sharpen certain skills.
I guess the bottom line is that I'd be concerned about employing someone who can't remember a password. You write it down until you memorize it, you treat that piece of paper as precious and secret, you burn it and scatter the ashes (or eat it, or whatever) when you no longer need it. It shouldn't be that difficult for a modern human who can understand how to operate a computer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In particular many *NIX environments still don't natively allow spaces in passwords, so that approach would fail there.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Slashdot is an excellent source of many of these sentences, as with spelling mistakes they're even harder to brute-force.
I sometimes set my password to ******** It sounds stupid but it has two advantages:
1. I know that I've typed in a * because I can see it
and, most importantly
2. When I have to repeat my password to confirm it, I can just copy and paste the previous field, saving me literally seconds of typing
Summation 2
I signed up for a forum a couple of weeks ago. I used the same generic password that I use for every other throw-away site out there, so it's easy to remember the damn thing. When I clicked submit, I got an error message telling me that my password needs a number in it. So I append a '1' on the end to satisfy the filter, and click submit again. I get *another* error message telling me that it needs to be mixed case, so I capitalized the first letter. Now I'll forget the password and never be able to guess the damn thing again, so the next time I want to log in to whatever forum this was, I'll need it to send me an email with a reminder.
It would be really nice if they'd just turn those damn filters off. This forum site isn't a bank. I couldn't give two shits if someone hacks my account there, not that my regular password is particularly guessable anyway. Seriously, I my password to your dipshit forum shouldn't have to contain mixed case, three numbers, nine punctuation marks, Egyptian fucking hieroglyphs, and that goddamn symbol the artist formerly known as Prince uses. Failing that, it would be nice if they at least provided some instructions with the password box that say something to the point of "Capitalize the first letter of your generic password and append a 1."
[/rant]
Passwords that are too weak of course invite brute-force attacks. However, we find that relatively weak passwords, about 20 bits or so, are sufficient to make brute-force attacks on a single account unrealistic so long as a "three strikes" type rule is in place.
This may be statistically true, but isn't it missing the point of defense-in-depth? Why rely on three-strikes to catch brute force attempts, when you can also have a password that resists brute force in the first place.
According to the article (cited by the citation):"Users are frequently reminded of the risks: the popular press often reports on the dangers of ïnancial fraud and identity theft, and most ïnancial institutions have security sections on their web-sites which oïer advice on detecting fraud and good password practices. As to password practices traditionally users have been advised to . . . "
-Choose strong passwords
-Change their passwords frequently
-Never write their passwords down
I would suggest that this is a case for the popular quip: "Pick two".
I am not a crackpot.
Ha! Dumbass. You need a better password now, like the one I have on my luggage: 1-2-3-4-5
1-2-3-4-5? That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my planetary air shield!
My password ends in:
3...
4 PROFIT!.
It's a reward for whoever cracks it - they'll probably profit.
Here's another news flash for you, computers do not run on magic crystals.
Duh! Everyone already know they run on smoke...
Thankfully I use KeePass myself, so I have everywhere *different* ~20 chars totally random password. If you also use keyfile to protect the container, a trojan getting your master password doesn't matter. Some of them might also be stupid enough not to monitor the clipboard when you're pasting the password. And even if they do, you wont give out password to bunch of websites, services, email, servers etc at once and you're protected against malicious admins or people hacking servers to get passwords because you have different password everywhere.
I dont see why more people dont use KeePass or some other such software, it makes your passwords and accounts a lot more secure. And yes, stong passwords are better than short and easily guessed ones, specially in this case.
Nobody brute forces anymore. Nobody. Any sensible password challenge/response system (I doubt there is such a thing if it relies only on that, but I ramble...) will lock you out and disable the account after so many tries, and usually the amount of tries is far lower than the threshold where guessing yields a meaningful chance to succeed. If it doesn't, steer clear of such a system altogether, if it doesn't come up with one of the simplest security "features", it probably is hellish insecure altogether.
Take, just for example, various game account or freemail system that let you retry infinitly, because their support would be flooded if they locked you out after 3 tries. Yes, you could keep guessing. And probably it is done. So a "strong" password means more security. Usually, no. Because they invariably also feature some braindead password recovery feature (ya know, the supersecret questions like "what was the name of your pet dog", again with infinite tries) that is usually even easier to defeat than the password guessing game.
You can, essentially, really go back to "12345" style passwords. There are way more than three possible easy to remember passwords, from birthdays to loved ones' names to even your CC pin number, and three being the usual number of retries before lockout. And without lockouts, the average "guess-hacker" won't go for your password. They go for the other venues that are usually far easier to break.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
An other hurdle to usability is when you have multiple systems at work place that require a rotating complex password where you can't remember what password belongs to what system. Where I use to work we would have a password for the NT/domain PC login, and a password for the UNIX terminal thing everyone had to log into do anything. And withing the software on the UNIX terminal they used, for certain subsystems there was "shared" passwords that never changed, while remembered, they was still semi-complex, e.g. real word that substitutes a couple numbers for letters. I counted once, I had to know 25 different passwords, two-personal, and two "shared" to do my job, and I wasn't even working in a IT or IT-like postion.
There's a bigger problem that I've yet to see written about and that's the shared username/password issue. I have at least 2 dozen different accounts, if you include Amazon, EBay, credit cards, bank account, youtube, blog/forums, etc.There's no way that I'm going to use different user names for each of them.
And of course, I'm going going to use the same passwords for the accounts as well. While I'm not too worried about using the same username + password for both Amazon and Ebay, what if I have the same password for MyFavoriteBlog.com. A single nefarious employee at a large blogging/forum site has access to many username/password combinations. What's to stop that user from trying those username/password combinations through eBay, every major bank, every major credit card, etc?
In truth, I user different user names for more "secure" sites like Amazon and banks than I do for ones that I don't trust, but I'll bet that most people don't bother.
Forcing users to change passwords does nothing against keyloggers either. But it definitely makes it easier to tell when a user has changed their password.
They'll type the current known password, then tab or click, then type some new cryptic garbage, then tab or click, then the same cryptic garbage.
But the worst possible password constraint I can think of is limiting the maximum number of allowed characters. I can think of absolutely no good reason for this restriction, yet large companies, such as Cedar Point's online reservation system posses this restriction.
Question everything
As all things in security, it's not black and white.
What exactly does "strong" mean? That's the important password.
In most circumstances, your threat model why you need a "strong" password is password guessing. It is rarely an actual brute-force attack, because most systems these days prevent a brute-force attack (e.g. they lock you out or reset your password to a random one that they send you per mail if you try it more than X times).
If your threat model does not include brute-force attacks, what you need is a "difficult to guess" password. That means you don't use "password" or "secret" and you don't use your own name, the name of your significant other or dog, your birthday and so on.
And that's all there is to it, really. All the bullshit about using numbers, special characters, etc. is just that - bullshit. It's defense against a threat that's not important anymore.
IANAL, but I am a security professional. Most of my passwords contain no numbers, and where the systems enforce them, there's usually a single number at the end or beginning. But I can type all my passwords in about a second on a standard keyboard. That makes shoulder-surfing a lot more difficult. In fact, I can make fairly good guesses at most "hunt and peck" people's passwords when I watch them type it in from across a small room. And the more difficult it is, the longer it takes them to type it in, and the easier it is for me to spot it.
So it all depends on your threat model, as always. Know what you need to defend against, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how you need to defend.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Conventional "strong" passwords protect against someone trying to guess or brute-force the password. They're really good at this.
The problem is, few attackers try to guess or brute-force passwords anymore. It's too time-consuming and too readily detected. Most of them will try to get you to tell them the password by one means or another. Phishing e-mails, keyloggers, traffic sniffing, man-in-the-middle attacks, the whole point of all of them's to get your password directly without having to figure out what it is. And against that sort of attack, "secret" is precisely, exactly as secure as "wkL3jfo*Zle". To guard against those attacks you need to strengthen things other than the password itself. And part of what you have to harden against attack is the user themselves, which makes it unlikely you'll succeed.
Keepass only works so well if you have a keylogger AND configure it properly. If you have a trojan + keylogger where they can log the entry and download the file, the whole concept is moot.
figure out your password + copy your credential + copy your keepass file? It's not like keepass originated yesterday.
There is no perfect solution. There are "best practices" and thats about the best an average person can hope for.
1-2-3-4-5?
Newbs. The highly secure password on US Nuclear weapons used to be:
00000000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link
On the other hand, at least the US weapons actually have locks. Other countries' nukes don't.
What annoys me is when the security people demand passwords that are, in terms of strength, way out of proportion to the data they protect.
My bank password? Yes, that should be strong. The forum where I go for auto repair advice? No, I shouldn't have to memorize an 8 character password with at least one upper case, one number, and one symbol character.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Years ago one of my co-workers was asked by management to do a global password change on the systems (s)he supported. It was to be done late Friday afternoon for the "usual" reasons. The systems were such that you couldn't just expire them so they were individually reset to new ones. (S)He did this and then put post-its on everyone's monitor to let them know what their new password was when they came in on Monday. Shortly thereafter there was a new global password change.
You should set your password to,
I am a pedophile and this encrypted partition contains my child pornography.
That way, if a court orders you to reveal your password, you can plead the 5th Amendment.
-- 77IM
PS. I am not a pedophile, and my encrypted partition no child pornography, just pirated movies and TV shows.
Student: Is it true that the foundation of the universe is paradox?
Master: Well, yes and no.
Keepass will work fine and dandy until enough people are using it where it's worth exploiting. The targets of most of this stuff aren't individual users. They're the broad audience, which a percentage will do a compromising activity.
I'll admit, I once worked for a company who sent spam. This was before the days of it's evilness, and laws, and ... well, what it's become.
The general thought at the time was, for every 100 emails sent out, there would be approximately 3 paying customers. Those were targeted towards previous account holders, which still is in the gray areas of legal. Even though the customer base continued to grow through this method, but more of affiliate marketing, the returns on sending the notices dwindled as spam became a bigger problem. 3% became 1%. We never sent any more mailings after the conversion rate dropped to something like 0.02%. I spoke with someone later (probably about 7 years ago) who was still in that business. He said no matter what the product was, the conversion rate was down to 0.0003%. That business folded from ISP pressures, and they went into the business of handling mailing list transfers. They acted as the neutral intermediary, to ensure both parties would be satisfied with the transaction. That dried up as the conversion rates dropped down below 0.0001%. Who wants to send 1 million emails, to make a single $29.95 sale? Well, they still try, or our spam boxes would be empty.
The same will happen with this market. As users become smarter or have better technology protecting them, the market will dry up. But in our current state, key loggers grabbing passwords, bank info, etc, is a lucrative business. I am very happy to say that I have never, nor ever will, be involved in that line of work. It's one thing to market and sell something. It's another to blatantly steal from an oblivious user.
How will this market dry up? It won't be better antivirus/antispyware applications. Those are just chasing the problem. How was a big dent put into the spam industry? Innovation and education. You can ask even the barely computer literate "Should you buy something from an email that someone you don't know sent you?". The majority of answers will be "No".
Such malware isn't quite as in your face, and masquerades itself quite gracefully. If it's a well written piece, you'd never know it was there. Fortunately, most of them aren't as well written as they should be.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.