Deloitte: Use a Longer Password In 2013. Seriously.

clustro writes "Deloitte predicts that 8-character passwords will become insecure in 2013. Humans have trouble remembering passwords with more than seven characters, and it is difficult to enter long, complex passwords into mobile devices. Users have not adapted to increased computing power available to crackers, and continue to use bad practices such as using common and short passwords, and re-using passwords across multiple websites. A recent study showed that using the 10000 most common passwords would have cracked >98% of 6 million user accounts. All of these problems have the potential for a huge security hazard. Password vaults are likely to become more widely used out of necessity. Multifactor authentication strategies, such as phone texts, iris scans, and dongles are also likely to become more widespread, especially by banks."

Comments

I Got It!

[pmcizhere]

correcthorsebatterystaple. It's a perfectly long, easy to remember password. Just, nobody use it other than me, ok?

Re:I Got It!

[AliasMarlowe]

I currently use "11111111", and Deloitte says I should use at least 9 characters?
Easy peasy, I'll buy some time by making it 12 characters long: "111111111111".

Re:I Got It!

[LoRdTAW]

A better question would be, what system would allow 1000 password guesses per second to be authenticated? Most systems lock you out after 3 to 5 unsuccessful attempts. And I would hope that smart developers would put a time delay between how fast a user can reattempt to authenticate. So a computer sending authentication attempts in less than one second would be immediately blacklisted as a automated attack. Inserting a second or two delay between attempts would guarantee that. Assuming a computer could brute force a password by trying all possible strings, what system could that possibly be effective against? I can see that it could be useful against an encrypted file but an online banking site or other eCommerce site sounds impractical. anyone care to elaborate?

Re:I Got It!

[OzPeter]

A better question would be, what system would allow 1000 password guesses per second to be authenticated?

Irrelevant, as the cracking will happen offline after the bad guys have stolen your PW DB by exploiting other weaknesses in your system

Re:I Got It!

[alvinrod]

It's bad because much like you can have a computer program randomly combine letters, numbers, and symbols to generate a password, you can simply have the same program combine dictionary words together. There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, which would make the number of combinations quite large, but most of those words aren't commonly used so you could ignore them. If you had people generate a four word pass phrase, it's quite likely that most of them would contain only words from a relatively small subset of the English language.

When I use pass-phrases, I make sure to include some capital letters, numbers, and symbols. This makes it almost impossible to brute force. So for example, 2Correcthorse4batteryStapple! would be a much more secure password, that really isn't any more difficult to remember. It's only using 7 symbols, which makes it fairly easy to remember. Once you type it enough, muscle memory will allow you to enter it without too much issue.

You could make it even more complex by using slang words, words from other languages, proper nouns, or other such words.

Re:I Got It!

[AndrewStephens]

True, but nobody tries breaking into a system by logging in ten thousand times a second to a single account. The recent well-publicised break-ins resulted from the hashed password file being publicly available, either stolen through a vulnerability or maliciously leaked. If the attackers have the hashed passwords they can try them at a rate of millions or billions of attempts per second for as long as they want.

Re:I Got It!

[vux984]

4 symbols chosen randomly from a dictionary of ~200,000 by a computer not by you because you won't choose words randomly.

that makes it a 1 in 200000^4 to guess... or 1.6 x 10^21

compare that to an 8 character password also randomly generated. Passwords which are drawn from a set of around 90 symbols. (50 letters including upper and lower case, 10 digits, and ~30 symbols)

that's 90^8 or a measly 4.3 x10^15

a 4 word randomly chosen password from a dictionary is by far the better password, and much easier to remember too.

An 11 character password of completely random gibberish is about equivalent, to 4 random dictionary words. Good luck remembering somthing like `oN{/QM9PKb

which is no better than:

scald obsolescent period postpone

Re:I Got It!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to do this to the college lab computers (running NT 4 at the time). I'd walk in with a floppy, reboot, copy the SAM file to disk, return to the dorms and crack away. Typically, I'd have the entire password file cracked in 10-12 hours. The machine doing the cracking was a P3 500Mhz. When I did the lab computers, I was shocked to find the administrator password on all the machines was the 5-character room number of the campus's IT department. And, it took about all of 10 seconds to crack. Getting password file without a bootable floppy proved a little harder, but not much. All you had to was replace the login screen's screen saver with a copy of cmd.exe, and be patient. Then, a little utility to dump the hashed password from memory. (For a long while, the login "screen saver" ran as SYSTEM). This also worked on Windows 2000 & XP which had an extra layer of encryption over the SAM.

Re:I Got It!

[interkin3tic]

Naive question, does anyone still brute force attack passwords? Are there websites out there that will allow you to try more than, say ten times before locking your account? If you're talking about the difference between 10 million different passwords and 4 billion, but facebook will lock down your account after 20 tries, there's not really a significant difference between the two. It seems like my accounts are always being locked down due to trying the wrong password from trying to "brute force" using every password I remember.

Re:I Got It!

[dgatwood]

Your definition of "common words" is off by about an order of magnitude from reality, though. A typical person only uses about 10,000–25,000 words on a regular basis, depending on their level of education.

Even assuming the upper end of that, nearly all people would typically choose from about 3 * 10^17 possibilities, which at 350 billion attempts per second, would take only around ten days to crack. On the lower end, a sizable percentage of people would choose from about 1 * 10^16, which would take about eight hours to crack.

Re:I Got It!

[tattood]

You could also use a password manager, which creates a random, unique password for every site for you. You have to remember one master password to use the program, and it automatically enters the username and password for you when you log into a website.

Unless your computer is hacked and the master database stolen, it's a pretty decent way to use unique passwords.

Re:I Got It!

[buchner.johannes]

Use a 2 for extra security. Computers can only find ones and zeros.

Re:I Got It!

[Anonymous Coward]

Password too long, please enter 8-12 characters.

Re:I Got It!

[SethJohnson]

Beardo, This is a great mechanism for me to abuse to lock all your users out of the system.

Great thinking, there.

Seth

Re:I Got It!

[vux984]

An NFC enabled phone would be ideal. Store passwords on the phone.

Meanwhile police around the country are facing an epidemic of cell phone thefts.

everything is stored in one place that you always have access to.

Well, you have access to it unless it was stolen.

Or you dropped and it now its broken.
Or the battery is dead.
Or ...

Re:I Got It!

[DarkOx]

The answer is yes but its not the guy you think doing it. We still live in a largely single factor authentication world. Since you used facebook as an example I will too, but hopefully you can see how and why similar issues could come up in other organizations.

You correct in that there are very few online brute force attacks, because as you say effective controls exist timeout intervals, lock outs etc on most systems. Somewhere there this is a file or table with password hashes, ideally salted. This is vulnerable to brute force because you don't use the 'system' to try and log in you build your own hash generator that works through a word list generating hashes and seeing if any match. The size of a good word list, say the Oxford dictionary, with each word also spelled with some typical numeric substitutions and followed by various arrangements of !, 4theWin! etc is pretty large. When you then multiply that out by the number of possible salt values you end up with a word + set of hashes that is many TB in size. Its to large to search efficiently with out special purpose built systems. This is known as a rainbow table; it used be popular but CPUs and GPUs have gotten so much faster they make sense in fewer cases.

Because searching the rainbow table takes so long and salts are now known to you its actually faster to generate the [list of salts] * [word list entries] on the fly and see if you match any of the password hashes. If you do match one you know know the password. This is the sort of attack people mean when they say brute force password attack now most of time.

So how would an attacker get the password file? Well in many cases it would be an inside job. Let assume facebook has a policy that employees are not allowed to bypass the privacy controls and access the pages of celebrities, politicians, etc. Admins can do it because its sometime a requirement of their job but the back end systems always audit this sort of activity. So someone abusing the master key will be punished. Now lets also suppose access to the master password file is also protected fairly well. Attempts to read it by non-authorized process etc are logged. Ah but what about if someone replaces a raid disk in a authentication server that was not really bad? Is it possible it could be read off a backup tape by an operator who knows the key etc. There are probably holes, insiders might use; even in mostly secure environments.

So now mister admin that really wants to know who K.Stu is banging this week can take the password file home with him and brute force it. Once he has her password, he can log in as her. The password not been rest, which might have been logged, or noticed by the user and reported etc, so chances are he can do whatever he wants with very little chance of detection and no audit trail that will point back to him, remember he has stolen the users identity. So yes he might have gotten the data anyway through other means but this way he can do it with everyone being unaware.

This is one of the hole that strong passwords and semi frequent rotation are seeking to close. The hope is if it takes enough weeks to brute force, you will have changed it by the time its been cracked.

   

Re:I Got It!

[Luckyo]

No. But it makes good headlines and sells whatever "security expert of the day" happens to be peddling.

On most of the web, a good secure 8 random character password that you don't reuse on other sites is about a few orders of magnitude too secure for hackers to even bother thinking about cracking. The "account hacks" are usually about people managing to steal a list of user names and passwords from some shitty forum that has old version of BBS software, and then trying those combinations of user names and passwords on other sites. Pretty much all brute force methods require direct access to database that is badly encrypted (perhaps behind a weak password that they intend to crack?).

Other then these scenarios, vast majority of "your password is too short and as a result not secure" is scaremongering bullshit.

Full disclosure: I have several battle.net accounts, a LoL account and countless other similar game accounts that are very much wanted in hack and sell world, all under the same email. I get absolutely hammered by "your account is being closed for hacking, click here to fix" phishing emails and other similar bullshit on that email address. My WoW account was very valuable for a couple of years (very good server, easily within top 0.1% of people in terms of wealth and in top 1% in terms of rare items and progression, legendary and so on). Didn't get hacked a single time. Several guildies and countless people I know had their accounts hacked during this time, some more then once. I used, and still use a short UNIQUE password for each account. Not a single account breach.

Why? Because no one sane brute forces remote passwords when doing actual hacking for profit. It's bloody stupid to even bother trying. There are far more profitable and easier methods, that actually work.

Re:I Got It!

[dgatwood]

And then you have a password that you won't readily remember, because you haven't seen the word "turgid" since the SAT.

Until artificial limits are removed...

[eksith]

I used my online banking today and they limit to 8 characters EXACTLY... even though they demand a non alpha-numeric character and mixed case. I keep thinking, these idiots still don't get it. Also, obligatory.

Re:Until artificial limits are removed...

[eksith]

That's usually a guarantee they don't hash passwords :/

Or they use some kind of encoding scheme instead that just lengthens with password size and letter case (DB field width will get maxed out) and don't use parameters for DB inserts/updates so special chars would wreak havoc with queries. Sometimes that's because they're running ancient software, but other times it's pure and simple laziness or disregard. It's hard to care about a project under near-slave-labor conditions in some of those sweatshops.

Re:Until artificial limits are removed...

[mentus]

Don't complay too much. The convenience vs security balance can all too quickly pend to the [lack of the] former. Doing online banking in Brazil in any of the major banks is becoming a major PITA. Santander for instance, requires you to install a browser plugin (available in native version for IE or Firefox, or via Java in the case of Chrome) just to be able to login to the IB. You also need a special IB-only password which must be numbers and letters (mixed-cased), and if you type it incorrectly more than 2 times, they automatically suspend your IB password and you need to talk to your account manager to be able to unblock it.

Do you think that's all? Nope. With that you can only use IB in 'read only mode', not being able to perform any transaction that might make a debit to your account. Then you have to request a 'codes card', with is basically a very cheap version of a token, albeit a little less secure. Upon completion of each transaction you'd be required to type one of the codes in your card. Thing is, fraudters caught up to that pretty quicly, and started sending phising mail where they'd lead the baits to a website passing as the bank asking them to type all their codes for 'security purposes'.

So then they made it compulsory to register each computer you use IB with, therefore forcing you to use a whitelist to enable trusted computers. You actually have to go in person to an ATM machine and use your debit card + 3 letter PIN + 4 digit debit PIN to authorize each computer. Thing is, so many people have machines so full of malware that this wasn't enough to stop the fraudsters.

Next in line was their latest addition: now in order to be able to make transactions online, not only you must have the IB password, install a proprietary browser 'security plugin', the token card, authorize your machine previously on an ATM with your debit card + 3 letter PIN + 4 digit debit PIN, you also must have a mobile phone on your file with the bank. Then, after you use all your passwords and code card in a trusted machine, they then generate a 7-digit code that is send via SMS to your mobile phone (which can also be only updated in person or in an ATM with both pins).

What if you don't have a mobile phone? What if you don't have signal at the moment you want to perform the transaction? What if your phone battery is out of charge? Well, tough luck, you'll have to go to a Santander ATM machine, because all these security paranoia features are mandatory...

The thing is, this a perfect example of adverse selection in effect, so now every bank is demanding you to install proprietary plugins (which are usually modified rootkits themselves..) to ensure the safety of your machine before being able to use any IB. Some are already demaning the use of SMS on a per-transaction basis and the process of using IB is getting more inconvenient by the day...

When I compare that with the breeze that is using the IB for my HSBC account in the US... it makes me wonder how much inconvenience is enough to tolerate...

Two factor authentication

[pwnies]

Don't use a longer password, just use two factor authentication.

Re:Two factor authentication

[swillden]

As long as it's actual two-factor authentication. None of the fake crap that people call two-factor.

No kidding. My bank (I really need to change) uses two factor authentication. To log in you have to know both the username and the password! In order to make this more secure, they apply password quality requirements to both. Yes, that's right, your username must be mixed case and contain alphabetic and numeric characters, and must be at least 8 characters in length. Symbols are not allowed, however, since that would just be weird.

For the record, asking me to pick a picture isn't a second form.

Most places that use a picture aren't using it as a second authentication factor. It's an anti-phishing countermeasure. The idea is that you pick a picture when you set up your account and then every time you log in you should see your picture. If you don't see your picture, then you know you aren't really looking at your bank's (or whatever) web site, but an attack site. Of course it's not an effective countermeasure against attack sites that use your credentials to connect to the real bank site in the background, get the picture from the bank and then show you what you expected to see. But it does prevent some phishing.

Duh...OK.

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

hunter22

I love old news.

[mcmonkey]

The relationship between password length and password strength is old news.

But don't tell users, tell the programmers and system admins. I regularly encounter systems where max password length is 12 or fewer characters. For some reason there are also systems that don't allow characters other than letters and numbers in passwords.

Let us make longer, more secure passwords. Let us use special characters, unicode, tabs and spaces!

Re:I love old news.

[SuricouRaven]

xapsdogien32
> Error: Must include at least one punctuation character.
xapsdogien32!
> Error: Must not contain a dictionary word.
xapsd_ogien32!
>Error: Maximum length twelve characters.
psd_ogien32!
> Error: Must include an uppercase character.
A1!
> OK

Re:I love old news.

[swillden]

12? I know a freaking BANK where the character limit for the password is 8. Yep 8 character password to online banking.

I was an IBM security consultant for about 10 years. I worked for all sorts of corporations big and small, talking to them about their security practices. Do you know which industry consistently had the worst security practices? Banking. It's amazing. I once talked to a bank that moves very large amounts of money (9+ figures) daily in wire transfers, communicated by kermit transfer of unencrypted files over a dialup modem. This was around 2005, and it actually wouldn't shock me to learn they're still doing it the same way.

Now I work for Google, and part of my job entails setting up secure communications with banks. Almost without exception every bank tries to argue us into lowering our security requirements. It's not like we're asking for anything crazy, either: strong encryption and mutual authentication using standard algorithms and protocols and adequately-large keys (e.g. 2048-bit RSA, 128-bit AES, etc.), with proper key exchange protocols and periodic key rotations. It's not rocket science, but it's beyond the IT staff of most banks.

I am frankly amazed that there aren't more major security breaches in our banking infrastructure.

Git Rid of Asinine Password Requirements First

[Secret Agent Man]

• Minimum lengths? Sounds good.
• Require a non-alphanumeric symbol? Sounds good.
• Must have at least one lowercase letter, capital letter, punctuation, number? Uh...
• Max length of 12 characters. Wat?

Some password requirements are perfectly acceptable, even encouraged. There exist plenty, however, that just make one scratch one's head. Why would a maximum length any lower than several hundred characters ever be necessary? More egregious limitations include requiring an insanely complex number of symbol/letter/number combinations (easy for AI, hard for humans, as XKCD eloquently points out) and, of course, passwords restricted to numbers only. Sadly financial institutions seem to be fond of this one, possibly under the mentality that a PIN is just as good as a password, and customers won't forget that!

Secret Plans

[SJHillman]

I think some places encourage short passwords. StudentLoans.com is Citibank's site for, you guessed it, student loans. The MAX password length is eight characters. That only encouraged me to pay off my loan to them faster just so I wouldn't have to deal with security like that.

Of course, nowhere in the signup do they warn you that only the first eight characters of your password will be accepted, nor does the login box limit you to inputting eight characters. I signed up with abcdef12345678 and tried signing in with abcdef12345678 but it gave me password refused. By luck, I tried abcdef12 and it worked. Screw Citi and all of the others still using password schemes from the early 90s

Re:Passwords are shit.

[LordLucless]

Probably not. I can type my mis-spelt Shakespeare quote of a passphrase faster than I can type an obtuse non-alphanumeric-laden password, because I'm far better at typing English sentences than I am weird symbol sequences.

Re:Passwords are shit.

[Wonko the Sane]

Because a lot of websites, especially financial sites, have stupid limitations on password length and/or complexity.

Use TPM

[Chemisor]

Instead, store your password on a TPM chip, from where the hash can not be stolen and where the attempt rate can be regulated. This way even 7 character passwords can be quite secure.

no solution

[Tom]

Password length matters to brute force attacks - and if your application allows a brute force attack to happen, it is broken already, insecure by design.

Enforcing longer passwords will not improve security for real-life cases. Enforcing more cryptic passwords will actually reduce security for real-life cases. Why? Because people will need to type slower, making shoulder-surfing easier. People will start to write passwords down, and they will re-use passwords more often.

You can't solve this issue with simple solutions like "use longer passwords". The only thing that will do is make "password1234" the new standard instead of just "password".

I already use a 25 character password.

[elucido]

So this (just use an 8 character password) is for sissies. I also don't write my passwords down and they include special characters, large and small letters, numbers, and are completely random. It's not possible to crack a 25 random character password. I suggest everyone follow me and use 25 characters at least.

Re:There should be a limit to password retries. !0

[elucido]

My data is backed up to the cloud. Try wiping that.

Future Article:

[virgnarus]

It's 2155, and Daniel Vectorstar, our resident security analyst, states that everyone this year should keep their passwords to a minimum of at least 3 pages, single-spaced...