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MD5crypt Password Scrambler Is No Longer Considered Safe
As reported here recently, millions of LinkedIn password hashes have been leaked online. An anonymous reader writes "Now, Poul-Henning Kamp a developer known for work on various projects and the author of the md5crypt password scrambler asks everybody to migrate to a stronger password scrambler without undue delay. From the blog post: 'New research has shown that it can be run at a rate close to 1 million checks per second on COTS GPU hardware, which means that it is as prone to brute-force attacks as the DES based UNIX crypt was back in 1995: Any 8 character password can be found in a couple of days. The default algorithm for storing password hashes in /etc/shadow is MD5. RHEL / CentOS / FreeBSD user can migrate to SHA-512 hashing algorithms.'" Reader Curseyoukhan was one of several to also point out that dating site eHarmony got the same treatment as LinkedIn. Update: 06/07 20:13 GMT by T : An anonymous reader adds a snippet from Help Net Security, too: "Last.fm has piped up to warn about a leak of their own users' passwords. Users who have logged in to the site were greeted today by a warning asking them to change their password while the site investigates a security problem. Following the offered link to learn more, they landed on another page with another warning."
If you get your password wrong, you can't try again for 1 second. Every failure doubles the time required to try again.
Why doesn't everyone do that?
It doesn't help if your attacker has got hold of the list of hashes.
1. Steal hashes
2. Brute-force on your own system/cloud/botnet/whatever
3. Use password
Indeed.
The effort to use a more secure hash is generally trivial, but there's still going to be a lot of people who either know and don't, or don't know.
For the first category, nothing you can do about it. Same people running wep on their wifi. They either don't see anyone ever attacking them, are tied in due to old systems, or don't care.
For the second category, stuff like this may help. I think at this point most people know md5 isn't as secure as once considered, but I don't think people realize just how insecure it is becoming. In peoples minds it's still in the "theoretically if someone was really dedicated they could break it" stage.. whereas it's actually entering into the "feasible to do it on large scale" stage. Breaking that perception might speed things along.