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Password Security: Why the Horse Battery Staple Is Not Correct
First time accepted submitter Dadoo writes By now, everyone who reads Slashdot regularly has seen the XKCD comic discussing how to choose a more secure password, but at least one security researcher rejects that theory, asserting that password managers are the most important technology people can use to keep their accounts safe. He says, "In this post, I'm going to make the following arguments: 1) Choosing a password should be something you do very infrequently. 2) Our focus should be on protecting passwords against informed statistical attacks and not brute-force attacks. 3) When you do have to choose a password, one of the most important selection criteria should be how many other people have also chosen that same password. 4) One of the most impactful things that we can do as a security community is to change password strength meters and disallow the use of common passwords."
> asserting that a single point of ultimate failure is the most important technology
Yeah, it's important all right. Critical, even.
We're being awfully slow about teaching people to adopt passphrases. Simple, no number no symbol nonsense.
"rrrybgdts" is a nursery rhyme. It doesn't even have to be written on a sticky.
For example I am not worried that someone might get my Slashdot password.
Email, shopping and banking passwords are the ones I worry about.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... and multiple-step authentication, as well.
And, for secret questions, sites should warn to lie, lie, lie (but remember).
Until these steps have been completed according to best practice, the user should not be allowed to progress any further.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
1) Choosing a password should be something you do very infrequently
Wrong. Once your password is compromised (e.g. by use of a keylogger or otherwise), hackers can use it over and over again.
It is much better to use One-Time-Passwords (OTPs) such as the ones generated by two-factor authentication systems.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It's not Bruce Schneier, so it's not serious!
Bruce Schneier slashdotted slashdot.
Some of us (perhaps we are quite the exception) work in environments where we are not allowed to have personal electronic devices. For people like us, password managers simply are not an option.
But this is out of your control in most cases. When you are forced to change it every 60 or 90 days, how does the rest of the argument hold up? (Of course I didn't RTFA to find out, this is Slashdot)
1) The frequence of choosing a password is not within the end-user's control, and hence has no impact on whether or not the end-user chooses to include special characters vs several simple words.
2) Protecting against a brute force attack does not, in any way, break protection against "informed statistical" attacks.
3) End-users do not typically know how many other people have chosen that same password, but can protect themselves against accidentally choosing a common password by doing exactly what the XKCD comic recommends (picking four random words and juxtaposing them). Just don't use the specific password chosen in the comic.
4) Disallowing common passwords is not within the end-user's control. It is a good practice, but does not in any way change the password-selection logic that end users should use as per the XKCD comic.
The only contradictory point mentioned is the "change password strength meters", which might mean "require special characters and numbers," which is exactly what the comic demonstrates to offer no value. The intent here seems to be the avoidance of common passwords, and that can be done without forcing special characters, which makes passwords hard to memorize.
Just because the author asserts that the password system is broken doesn't make Randall Munroe's point about passwords incorrect. "At least one security researcher rejects that theory." What theory does he reject? It's simple math that shows that Munroe's method is better for creating stronger passwords (at least for the average user), but that has nothing to do with relying on password managers...
symbols, caps and numbers are still very useful when the site limits password length.
Good, bad & ugly - Your password
PASSWORD REQUIREMENTS
A good password must have two properties:
1) It has been memorized by the user
2) It is difficult to guess for a third person (even if he/she knows the user well)
But in most cases another requirement is thrown into the mix:
3) The password shell be complex (have a high entropy)
Usually the requirements take the form of a password policy like this:
The password must be at least 8 characters long
The password must contain upper- and lower-case letters
The password must contain a number
The password must contain a non-alphanumeric character
You notice anything? Yep, this policy only focuses on the third requirement. And it does so at the expense of the first requirement and (knowing human psychology) it also has a negative impact on the second requirement.
THREATS TO PASSWORDS
Let us take look at how the security of password can be compromised:
- The input of the password has been observed (by eavesdropping, key-loggers or by the ordinary Mark 1 Eyeball)
- The password has been re-used by the user in a different context where the attacker has access to it
- The attacker gained access to the encrypted storage of password and managed to extract it from there
- The password has been guessed by the attacker
How does having a complex password help you against these attacks?
In case of an attacker observing the user entering the password, no complexity will help. Rather the contrary, a password with mixed upper/lower-case, numbers and special characters is entered at a significantly slower pace. This helps an attacker observing the password by good old-fashioned peeking.
If the password is known to the attacker from the use in a different context, the complexity is no help either. Knowing the psychological side, cryptic passwords are rather compound the problem. Once a user has found a password that fits the typical policy, he tends to use it wherever such a password policy is in place and therefor increases the chances of an attacker to use a known password of the user in a different context.
In case of access to the encrypted password store, the complexity clearly helps to hamper the attacker (if the password is encrypted properly).
One would expect that password policy should help making a password un-guessable for a third person. From my personal observation the contrary is true. Under the watchful eye of a password policy they tend to stick to first names, upper-casing the first or last letter, replacing characters by similar looking special characters or numbers and/or adding numbers at the end (like birthdays).
Summary: Only in one attack scenario choosing a complex password helps, in all other scenarios it does not have any or even a negative impact. So let us look at this scenario a bit more detailed.
DECRYPTING PASSWORDS
To decrypt the password of a user, the attacker has first to have access to the password storage. At which point the first and most critical security failure has already occurred. And the user had nothing to do with it.
When it comes to decrypting a password, the algorithm used is a more important than the complexity of the password. If the service provider has not done his home work, complex passwords offer only little protection. This is another critical point, where the user has no influence whatsoever.
But in case of the service provider having botched the safety of his password file but made everything correct when choosing the algorithm the complexity of the user passwords can offer extra protection against the attacker.
Does this case justify all the negative impact?
I want to point out, that the safety of the encrypted password is not the responsibility of the user. So would say: Don't make him part of the process here. Don't shift the responsibility to to him where the service provider is responsible.
Remark: I did not specifically address the issue of an attacker
How the hell is picking random words going to be statistically attacked?
I have an algorithm I use to determine a password for any website. Which means I'm using unique, secure passwords that are simple to remember. As long as no one hacks into my brain and figures out my algorithm, finding out my Facebook password will not make an attacker any more likely to find my bank account password. I don't know why more people don't do this. It seems so obvious.
Entropy is key to a good Password. Increasing the password length is one of the easiest ways to increase entropy in a password. Very few people can remember a password like "Xl5xX8lB4XI5" which would take a single computer about 25 thousand years*
However, using long words "alligatorterrorizesnewyorkcity" would take 22 septillion years*
* according to https://howsecureismypassword....
That being said, I also agree that generating new passwords should be done with a Password Manager, however the first password is always the hardest. Which is why three long seemingly random words is much easier and safer, IMHO.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I generate a string of 20 random characters and paste it in.
The only password I keep in my head is for my email to reset passwords if I get logged out
This means that instead of a password strength meter you should be ensuring that there is no skew in the distribution of passwords. If each password is guaranteed to be unique, the advantage of a statistical guessing attack is greatly reduced.
OK, guys, now I just need all of you to tell me your passwords so that I could pick a different one.
Ezekiel 23:20
Here is a list of the 10,000 most commonly used passwords. Perhaps a list like this should be incorporated into account setup programs to disallow words on this list:
10,000 Top Passwords
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Even if we entertained the XKCD comic and started training users to select four random words instead of a complex single-word password, I argue that it would not amount to a significant increase in security.
People are not very creative and tend to think the same way when choosing passwords. This would lead to the exact same problem we have now, where a few passwords such as "password123" become very common. What is there to prevent “letmeinfacebook” from being the new most common four word password for Facebook accounts?
Umm, how would they "think" of random words? I think "random" means something like: you pick a dictionary, close your eyes, open it on a random page and put your finger; repeat as needed.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
The more often you make your users change passwords, the more likely they are to write them down on a post-it on their monitor.
Dude, you really need to take a class in statistics.
The summary quotes the article's own summary, but the headline and intro cause it to be misleading.
The article doesn't claim that "correct horse battery staple" is wrong, as in a bad way to choose a high-entropy password. It is a good way to choose a high-entropy password. The article argues (quite accurately) instead that users should not be choosing passwords at all because they will choose weak ones, even if you give them a fairly good heuristic (like the one from XKCD), or try to help them estimate the strength of their passwords, etc. Instead it suggests that we really should try to get rid of passwords entirely, and where that isn't possible we should encourage people to use truly random, non-memorable passwords and put them in password managers, essentially reducing all of their passwords to one: the password that opens their password manager.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
1) Choosing a password should be something you do very infrequently.
No. Passwords need to be rotated for all kinds of reasons. It results in the account being effectively disabled when account policies fail (forgotten service accounts etc). It ensures that if the password store has leaked and its not discovered strong passwords remain safe (can't be cracked in the rotation time) and that access to accounts with weak passwords is at least detected at some point. Passwords should be used uniquely person/organization for the most part, finer grains in some cases; most people form relationships with organizations frequently. So password selection actually occurs very often and should.
2) Our focus should be on protecting passwords against informed statistical attacks and not brute-force attacks.
Most "brute force" attacks are informed and statistical the offline ones anyway; you try to get the low hanging fruit first (birthdays, names, dictionary words and usual substitutions) before you do the exhaustive search of the key space. In online attacks where the attacker is throttled this has greater impact but a password that is strong against offline attack is also strong against online attack so I don't see any reason to place emphasis here, other than to simple say the best passwords have the most entropy.
3) When you do have to choose a password, one of the most important selection criteria should be how many other people have also chosen that same password.
Ok I can agree with this one, but really implementation is hard, beyond the usual is it in a dictionary of common passwords (good systems already implement this), you should not be able to know if lots of other people are using that password because you are only storing salted hashes right and everyone gets their own salt right?
4) One of the most impactful things that we can do as a security community is to change password strength meters and disallow the use of common passwords."
No the most important thing we can do is try to move away from password only security and move toward two factor, which is more and feasible now that most people are carrying a cell phone that can at least get SMS messages.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Reading TFA, this guy just reinvented public/private key infrastructure where your password manager acts as your keystore.
In any case where a so called "password manager" could be used, we would be better off using a keystore. You loose ease of logging in from different devices in either case. One needs to carry around its password/key database in both scenario or store it in a centralized database.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Leave it to a Great Old One to figure out a way to completely befuddle the password policy enforcer.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
The core problem is that security has many different approaches.
A password manager is great ... as long as it is available to you on all the devices that you use to login from. Which makes it vulnerable to being cracked when one of those devices is cracked.
And that isn't even addressing things like the recent rash of credit card cracks being reported. Even if you keep YOUR password secured the attackers can still attack the system when you use the secure information.
Instead, the focus should be on the knowledge that you will, eventually, be cracked. At least partially. So be prepared to mitigate the damage done at that point.
Too many people have too much access to your information without the personal incentive to keep it secure. Or the knowledge of how to secure it. Password managers are an improvement in many scenarios. But so is writing your passwords in a book that you keep at home.
While I agree with the researchers point that dictionary attacks are the biggest risk for passwords and that you shouldn't use the same password for every account you have I don't think that a password manager is required for all situations. For example I use the same password for Slashdot, Engadget, Toms Hardware and a few other entertainment accounts. None of these accounts can really cost me money so who cares if someone gets the password? I can just make a new one. So I don't think that sharing passwords in this case is bad. I call this password my "Insecure" password. Now for other services such as my bank, email, windows log in, work password. All of these passwords are unique but I don't have many of them so it isn't hard to remember them.
Relying on a potential attacker's lack of knowledge as a means of security. It's not so much how strong a password is. If the password has to be entered in an obscure way. Require the user to enter a charter then wait 2 seconds etc.
The article's author seems to think that a password manager is the One True Solution to passwords. You know what password managers are: They're those software programs, often web-based, that allow you to generate, store, and retrieve passwords. All you need to access your passwords is a single password. Also note that these passwords must be stored in a way that the original plaintext MUST be able to be retrieved at a later time. This means no hashing.
So now attackers have a wonderful target. All they need to do is figure out one password and they are given all of the others for free. Or, worse, a compromise of the whole system allowing them to get passwords to many different systems for all associated users - all at the same time.
A password manager is not the solution. It's a step backwards.
So far, people cannot crack into my brain and download the information. I am unconvinced that Correct Horse Battery Staple is not the way to go.
Password manager tools are only useful when you are logging in from your own device. What do you do when you need to hop on a friend's computer, or the one at the public library? Or are there cloud based password managers out there (and if so... that just raises further questions).
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
My banking websites would be much more secure if they disallowed any access from Eastern Europe.
Like "incentivize" or "impactful." Mine is "Leverigize123."
I've used Keepass for a long time, but I recently moved to Lastpass because getting Keepass to sync reliably is a major hassle, plus Lastpass works really well on Android, even for apps. I have a strong master password, which is easy to change regularly because I only have to remember that one password. I also have 2-factor authentication enabled through Google Authenticator. Every other password is randomly generated, I don't even know them.
Eat the rich.
Password managers don't really solve the problem. Many of them aren't really cross platform (by which I mean, they sync with and are accessible by all your programs/browsers for all of your devices), and as he recognizes, there will be some passwords that you can't store in the manager (e.g. the password to the manager itself, and for the devices that access your password manager). Beyond that, I didn't see any recognition anywhere that there are at least some services that you might want to access somewhere where you don't have access to a password manager. For example, the selling point of both webmail and services like Dropbox are that you can access your data on another person's computer. Are you going to want to download, install, and sign into a password manager on another person's computer.
So yes, password actually do need to be both memorable and strong.
However, I'd agree with him that really, passwords need to die. Or not actually die completely, but most sites should not require their own password. What we really need is some kind of standardized identity management system-- like you know how you can sign onto various sites using either your Facebook or Google+ sign-on? Like that, but standardized. We need a true single-sign-on solution that is easy to manage, hard to screw up and lose your identity permanently, and usable everywhere.
This has been obvious for well over a decade, but we can't do it because we don't create standards anymore. For any solution, Microsoft wants to have their solution, Facebook wants theirs, Google wants to do it their own way, and Apple wants to do something different from all the rest. Each company pretty much wants a solution that will benefit themselves and screw over their competitors. None are really focused on creating the best solution for social/economic/computing progress, and if they were, it would still be impossible to get others on board. So that's the real problem. Unwillingness to create standards.
he must have missed that class in school.
It seems to me the most likely machine to be compromised is probably a user desktop. Servers and web services can implement pretty effective countermeasures against brute force attacks (3 tries and you're done for an hour, 5 tries and you're done forever). Not to mention multi-factor authentication.
Putting all of your passwords no matter how complex on a windows 7 desktop with a single (easy to remember, easy for computer to guess) password, which can be trivially retrieved with a keylogger seems like completely broken security to me. One zero day in IE, keylogger installed, access to all user passwords for all sites granted.
You're literally a single hack away from having bank accounts, social media, email, everything hacked. Or am I wrong somehow about password managers/keyloggers?
Two form authentication is the real solution. Given enough time and computing people will break your hashed password. Heck with the oncoming quantum computers who knows if they will be secure at all.
Oh and heres an idea. Why don't we do a much better job of protecting the hashes in the first place. Encrypted the hash so a simple sql inject only returns even harder to see data. Put the data in another table. Use a stored procedures ( I know *GASP* ) to only allow one password hash to be retrieved at once. Use database schema permissions ( if available ) to make select password_hashed from hashes not allowed by the front end server.
I think honestly we hashed the password and then rubbed our hands together and patted each other on the back.
Somewhere along the line, about when Fedora's Anaconda installer UI was redesigned, Fedora introduced an information theoretic password strength meter that measures apparent bits of randomness.
Here it is in use in the Anaconda source: https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/anaconda.git/tree/pyanaconda/users.py#n130
Here is its official site: https://fedorahosted.org/libpwquality/
It would appear this information theoretic meter has made its way into Ubuntu and Arch.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Even with the best password, memorized or securely stored doesn't protect you against a password recovery process that's improperly engineered. Often an institution, even a BANK, will give you as a recovery password a choice from perhaps six possibilities, any of which can be divined from publicly available information or a little social engineering. Your password may be q4ot38yhewa;okl, but your password recovery phrase will be the street you lived on in high school or the name of your first dog. This is not secure.
And don't even get me STARTED about pin code security. When I set up my AmEx corporate card, the phone menu suggested strongly that I use digits that are easy to remember, like my mother's birthday. Ignoring the directions and entering a random code, I got rejected because my pin WASN'T A VALID DATE. I called tech support, told the tech monkey the error I was getting and he immediately said that I was to set it to my mother's birthday. I said I didn't want to use something that would so easily be discovered, and he seemed nonplussed. He had to consult with a supervisor. They eventually decided that I could use a random number, but I had to tell him the number over the phone so he could override the menu's requirements to use a valid date. This was AMEX!
Back to the lost password process, I give random strings as answers to the challenge questions, but I figure eventually banks won't let me use strings that aren't a valid dog's name or a listed street name in my home town.
I know why they do this -- it cuts down on service calls to require shlubs to use passwords that are easy for them to remember. But geeze... I foresee a time when we'll all be required to use the common name for an eating implement. Everyone will choose "spoon". The institution will be able to cut customer support back to one person in north-eastern Poland. Or perhaps they already have.
(I use Poland not to denigrate the Poles, but because a company I do business with was quite proud of the low low DL price they got for customer support hotline personnel in eastern Poland. To cover North American accounts. Because that makes sense. Really.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
1. Security is really about perception, and perceived barriers to entry.
2. Overly complex passwords end up being written down. Great if you already have secure locations that are difficult to access, bad if you have many public entries.
3. Sadly, MSFT was right about Security through Obscurity. The less visible a resource and entrances are, the less likely people are to try to hack them. The more boring, the better.
4. The most effective way to defeat security is through human social engineering. Every time. Without fail.
5. see 4.
6. But password encryption rules! see 4.
7. The greatest number of security breaches has always been through portable devices not secured properly and physically stolen or borrowed. Laptops, cell phones, those all have Internet. There's your most likely security breach.
8. See 7.
9. If you're worried about the NSA CSIS or other agencies, you're wasting your time. They're already in your systems. But they're stupid, and have no idea about old school WW II and thereabouts tradecraft. Use that. It will drive them insane.
10. Most security methods from WW II are still useable. Dazzle paint still defeats human facial recognition. Ministry of silly walks still defeats pattern analysis of human following on security vids. Really. Kind of surprising, but true. Mostly because modern intel agencies are too stupid.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If 500 people each use the "correct horse battery staple" approach to generating pass phrases, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts is going to have to break 5 passwords.
If 500 people each use the same password manager, then an attacker who wants to compromise 5 of those 500 accounts needs to break just one security mechanism -- the password manager itself. In addition, that attacker may have help in doing so, from all the other attackers that want to compromise a different set of 5 accounts from that group of 500.
If the security for that password manager is sufficiently stronger than the security of those pass phrases (think Fort Knox versus your local bank branch) then attacking the individual accounts will be easier. But if the password manager's security has a vulnerability (a back door into Fort Knox, manned by a guard who's just two days away from retirement) then that leaves not just one person vulnerable, but all 500.
1) Choosing a password should be something you do very infrequently.
horse battery type passwords encourage this by making the password relateable as well as affording excellent bruteforce protection. Bruteforce accounts for most password compromises outside of data breeches, which ultimately serve as a direct path toward and a source from which additional attacks can be performed.
2) Our focus should be on protecting passwords against informed statistical attacks and not brute-force attacks.
yes but this is infrequent and has little to do with password structure. in the article the NSA is sighted, but thats not exactly how they work. Youre more likely to have a secret court order Google to cough up your data, not your password. Your computer password on the other hand would be demanded at penalty of spending the rest of your life in contempt of court or guilty by default. either way they win.
3) When you do have to choose a password, one of the most important selection criteria should be how many other people have also chosen that same password.
I would argue the question is whether this password has ever been compromised or the breadth to which it is used online. more exposure means a greater chance of compromise. horse battery tries to get people to think creatively to avoid duplication however its not perfect.
4) One of the most impactful things that we can do as a security community is to change password strength meters and disallow the use of common passwords.
absolutely. this and two-factor, which is mentioned in the article, are critical steps in ensuring online services and applications encourage strong passwords. I think the attacks on horse-battery passwords are unmerited, and ultimately irrelevant once paired in a two-factor environment with a private or yubikey solution. intelligent service responses to bruteforce attempts, RBL's that blackhole compromised machines and subnets, and application support for longer than 8 character passwords are also important.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I used "Correct Horse Battery Staple" as my credit union password and was hacked almost immediately. As was nearly every geek I know who works here. So clearly he's right.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Choosing a password should only need to be done once per site, not "infrequently".
Passwords are generally leaked because someone either got the list of passwords, tricked the user into entering the password on the wrong area (e.g as with any phishing site), .extracted them from a local store on the person's hardrive because Firefox still doesn't auto-block random plugins be default, or used the rubber-hose decryption algorithm.
So, don't use a single password that appears on a dictionary attack. Trivial.
It's moot when the various websites come up with inconsistent password types, where your randomly generated password is rejected because it didn't happen to include a capital letter (even though it contains a punctuation mark), is rejected because it contains punctuation, is rejected because it's too long, etc.
Disallowing common passwords is as easy as downloading a list of common passwords and refusing anything with an exact match. If you have free extended strings, there's more than enough variation to kill anything statistical, leaving only the dumb users that pick something obvious that most sheeple do.
I suggest that you use the initials of all the people that you had crushes on when you were in middle school. You won't forget them, and brute-force cracking software is unlikely to detect your password.
For example, if you had crushes on Carly, Janis, Gina, Wanda, Jane, Janet, Joan, Julie, Sally, Cindy, Alice, and Farah, then your general password would be: cjgwjjjjscaf. Which is a wonderful password. [You can't help it: you're a hopeless romantic.]
Unfortunately, nitwit system admins are requiring people use passwords with numbers and "special characters".
Which brings us to the number one rule of passwords: Always Let The User Pick Their Own Password!
Rule number two: Never force anyone to change their password if they don't want to!
If you are serious about having unbreakable passwords, then forget all this number and special character nonsense and allow backspace to be a character in the password that your user chooses.
One more thing. If you're not guarding hydrogen bombs, then you don't really need hydrogen-bomb-level password security. You don't minimum 10 unique_characters_plus_numbers_and_special_character passwords for your kitten video website.
Did you know that slashdot makes star`s if you write your password in your post? Mine is ********
This. Far better than having us change our passwords often would be to display a short logfile at my first morning login of all recent login attempts (24 hours mid-week, 72 hours on Monday morning.). If I saw anything odd i could nip it in the bud. The 60-90 day routine just causes bad practices.
Compound frequency that with an obnoxious policy for maximum length, random characters, and so on and I'll tend to either keep hint on a sticky (say FB1 for FuBar1), or just cycle through a trailing unique number (FuBar2 for the next one, for example). Stupid policies have lead to stupid behavior, and frankly it is getting hard to feel bad about it.
What gets me is that most companies have RFID cards in or with their badges, why not stick a reader on every machine? Almost ANY password that required you to swipe your badge before entering it would be vastly better than almost any password on its own.
The problem has gotten bad enough that it sure feels like something is going to give soon and we might soon enter a post password world.
Bullshit... this guy is working in some fantasy world separated from reality.
Anecdotal example: I used to work for AT&T back in the 90s. They wanted to improve the security of an application so they changed the password requirements and had it require a 30 character pass phrase that included capitals, lower case, numbers, special symbols, no numbers could repeat, etc... The result? Everyone had a posit note with their password stuck to their monitor within a week.
All of your security measures are meaningless if no-one follows them. There was no way in hell we were going to remember our 30 character password without writing it down.
Password safe huh? And how do I log onto the computer in the first place? Or remember the password for the password safe? I need 2 passwords just to get into the safe! I have to pick a less secure password to protect the thing I keep all my passwords in?!?!
6 to 8 characters
make us change it every 90 days
Special characters don't matter
4 attempt lockout
done
If they can guess your password in 4 attempts, they know your god damned password.
So, which password manager do you use that is open source, safe, works on Linux, does not rely on or expose your secrets to a centralize party?
There are now lists of millions of stolen passwords, and frankly none of them are safe. Why shouldn't someone set up a password security app (like captcha, but in reverse) so that a large web site could
- download a large stolen password list (even 1 billion would only be a few GBytes)
- checks (a salted hash) of your password against the list (say, salts changed every day or hour or...) and
- if yours is on the list, tells you to do better
It seems this would be much safer than just having some app that counts punctuation characters and tells you your password is strong if it has more than 3.
I disagree with the author that the XKCD method isn't a good one. The XKCD comic presented the idea of using 4 completely unrelated words, but the author used a four word example using a sentence. His main issue seems to be that people are too stupid to remember multiple username/password combinations for multiple sites.
Why haven't we moved to using smart cards to access important sites like on-line banking? A smart certificate card + pin provides much better security.
Assumptions:
1. People aren't very good at choosing hard-to-guess passwords
2. Complexity (Case, numerics, special characters) don't significantly add to entropy
3. Password managers can create and store high-entropy passwords
4. Password managers must be secured with extremely strong, crack resistant passwords
5. People need to set the passwords for (4). See (1) above
And there's the rub with TFA's assertion that password managers are the band-aid to help us past the era of passwords. If we can educate people to create strong, memorable passwords/passphrases for the password manager, then people can do the same for other passwords. Which makes a password manager redundant.
If we cannot educate people to create strong, memorable passwords, then the likelihood is that password manager passwords will be just as weak as those the TFA is decrying, rendering password managers just one big target.
And since a password manager presumably contains lots of passwords for a variety of logins (including sensitive accounts), it becomes a much better target (especially when you can steal the password DB and perform offline cracking activities) than trying to crack passwords online.
The author of TFA is correct that there are issues with passwords, but his recommendation is poorly thought out and might be even more hazardous than the problem it purports to mitigate.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
I use keypass for my passwords. The thing is, as is well known, a huge attack vector is to compromise a service provider (let say Sony or Adobe), get a password database, then go and find all users who used the same password everywhere. I can have the strongest password EVAR!~, if I use it more than once, and someone who stored it improperly gets hacked, its over (thus why the moment a new MMO comes out, a bazillion people get hacked, because their account infos are in every password database available as torrents).
So that means, obviously, you need 1 password per service. Now, looking at my keypass file right now, and including "family" passwords (ie: accounts both myself and my wife need access to), I have _123_ distinct accounts. Some of them include stuff like my router's password, so let say I have 100~ passwords for 3rd party services.
100. A hundred fucking different passwords. These are just the ones I have needed in the last 1-2 months, from services like Hulu and Slashdot, to my town's website to pay taxes, going by banks for every one of my credit cards, and everything in between. It adds up.
No normal human being will be able to efficiently manage this amount of accounts and keep them all secure, keep up with which one recently got hacked to replace passwords, etc. The password managers are too complex for the average joe.
Want to make it worse? When I want to enter a password on my Nest thermostat, it takes fucking forever. Include a mistake or two and i just spent 15 minutes entering a semi-secure password. The Funimation channel makes me do the same thing on my TV. Its just insane.
So what does the average Joe without patience do? Of course, their password is now ABCD123. DONE.
Passwords are a flawed security mechanism, its just easy to implement. We need a new one.
I agree with this guy mostly, except in his assessment of the advice. The xkcd in question is very good advice for the times when you need to choose a password, and makes the case for why itself, I have nothing more to add to the comic than what it says on that topic.
Where I see this article as wrong is that it misses that xkcd is telling us how and why to use that method. It does not even attempt to address the point this guy is trying to make, which, is entirely different.
Yes, less passwords good.... password manager to replace passwords with random keys and protect them with a single good password....yes very good. Good advice but....you still need to choose a password for your fucking password manager.... leaving you right back where you started.
He failed to even address the point of the xkcd comic and instead is calling it wrong in order to make an entirely unrelated point. Perhaps because without mentioning xkcd, nobody would listen to his rather banal points that others have made before?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Having a strong password is not really relevant. If it complies to the basic rules of password strength, it's good enough. Because cybercriminals will not try to guess or crack your password. They'll hack the server or your computer, probably via malware or an exploit. What's more important is: did the website developer stored the password in a secure way and did you use a different password for every website?
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
After Heartbleed I brought up my password manager and changed 140 passwords in a few hours. If it wasn't for my password manager I would have never even known I had 140 passwords to change.
These things are amazing. Randomized passwords for all my accounts. In the event of a catastrophic failure all I have to do is remember three passwords to get everything back. My email password. my cloud password and the password to the encrypted db of passwords. As a person who deals every day with people who "don't even remember setting a password for that" I wish more people used these.
Ascii artist &
I don't understand why passwords are not stored on a hardware device that limits the frequency of confirmation requests to only what's needed through hardware. If you put the passwords on regular disks, then somebody can copy them and run brute-force guess-A-trons on them.
Have 2 run in parallel so you have a spare.
Table-ized A.I.
1978:
password
1983: Rule: Don't use 'password', too common.
passgas
1990: Rule: Must contain at least one digit
passgas7
1995: Rule: Must contain mixed case
Passgas7
1999: Rule: Must contain at least one punctuation character
Passgas7&
2004: Rule: Must change every 2 months
Passgas7& ... Passgas8* ... Passgas9( ... Passgas1! ...
2015: Rule: Must be at least 20 characters long
Passgas711111111111$ ... Passgas177777777777$ ...
2017: Rule: Can't use any patterns guessable by AI
Oh f$ck it, just hack me already, dammit @666
(Courtesy c2 wiki)
Table-ized A.I.
Ok, so he wants people to use a password manager. That's not that crazy. A viable alternative for the general populace.
But for me? I need to log into stuff from all over the place, so the manager has to live out on the net. It can't reside safely in my own semi-trusted computer. I need to log into stuff from my computer, my phone, work, occasionally a friend's computer. Not all scenarios are completely trust-worthy and I REALLY don't want to enter the same password I use for throw-away sites as the one I use to aid and abet ISIS durka durka muhamed jihad. I mean my porn. I mean my bad twilight fanfic. I mean my completely innocuous twilight-ISIS crossover fanfic with pornographic tendencies.
Anyway, do you REALLY think that everyone is going to choose the high road like Lavabits? Even Lastpass's corporate overlord, Marvasol, is based in Virginia. And I've no doubt that they've received a visit and a gag order from a three letter agency.
"You can't use PasswordABC as your password, because user Smith15 already uses it as a password" :P
Oh wait
Hyperom.com
The LAST thing I want is some NEW binary that I type my password into. Sounds like a one-stop-ownyface shop.
I'd rather have a random string for both my username AND password. It would be much harder to guess someone's account.
Which then means that if their password manager is compromised they're completely fucked.
Where does one get a password manager again?
There's at least 1: lastpass.
https://lastpass.com/how-it-wo...
stole my last /. pw. Prolly one of those crazy young American sexist pigs that like to hang out here.
work in progress
If I don't give a shit about a website that wants me to log into it I'm not going to create and memorize a new password. Most site administrators need a little more humility. Your site is not important enough to me for me to go to the trouble of creating a new password. If your site is mildly interesting I will use a common password that I use on all mildly interesting sites. Unless your password policies piss me off. Then the password will be P@ssword123. For the 4 or 5 sites that it would cause me personal pain or monetary loss if I was impersonated I will use 4 or 5 random words. I will use those 4 or 5 words all lower case and with no spaces or punctuation because that makes it easier for me to remember. For these sites I will also disable any kind of alternate password retrieval. I don't think it's that hard to figure out my mother's maiden name, my city of birth or my first public school.
Use a seven or eight word password made from common words. Actually, just make it a sentence. That will make it much easier to remember. So the password crackers can 'limit' their search to valid words. So what? If you had a seven character password of random, hard to guess characters a password guessing script would have to get seven positions correct with about 70 or so possible characters for each position. If you had seven words AND even if the password guessing script was written to expect words it would stil have seven positions to guess. With how many possibilities per position? How big is the dictionary?
Can we please stop supporting these "license plate" passwords already. They are just a pain in the ass.
Oh, and password managers? Really? So you can spend all that time making separate passwords for every place you need them just to place them all behind one password that gives an attacker the keys to everything. Yup, that makes a lot of sense!
"The fact is that the number of passwords you should memorize is pretty small..." ...Says the author. I mostly agree with him but feel that any password is as weak as the weakest internal security of the weakest site you use it on. It drives me nuts when coworkers use a complex password on a news site or to register to leave a comment somewhere. Unless you know all the employees at Slashdot, /. should be the weakest password you use. What, someone's gonna steal your mod points? The use of complex passwords on low risk sites confuses users who, when they forget their passwords, wind up "guessing" important passwords onto weak sites.
Gently reply
When your password manager is compromised and all of your passwords are now available.
What an idiot.
Why even let the users choose passwords? Just have the system run UUID() and give them the result. That is their password. Can't remember it? Click here to have it sent to your email address again.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Password security is only partially maintained through what the user does.
If you care about password security you also have to think about the server-side. And there we are doing things that are also just as bad as passwords are often stored using a single encryption algorithm if they are encrypted at all; and often that algorithm is a simple MD5 or SHA1 hash of the password.
In addressing the server-side, we must also make things more variable by introducing settings that the server administrators set. The password is split according to the rules with each part passed through different algorithms, and the results merged using rules as well. One part of the password might pass through scrrypt, while another may pass through SHA512, and only portions used to get what is stored on disk.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
If these signs
Were here today
The final one
Would likely say
Myanmar Shave
OpenID 2.0 accomplished something very cool: allowing a user to use any ID provider for authentication on any compatible web site, even if the two sites had never heard of one another. Unfortunately, it has two major problems:
In my opinion, the issue of relying parties not trusting someone else as an identity provider was not such a big deal; certainly not enough to have killed OpenID. For every such distrustful site, there are dozens more simple web forums and the like that would be happy to get rid of their password database.
*stackexchange is a notable exception; they still offer the input box if you click a link.
Just look at the usernames in slashdot. They all make very good passwords. Take my username, please. It is a damn good password. If I can casually waste it as user id, imagine how many more goodies where it came from. 263Bhaskar 264Kuppa 261Shyam 260Thomas 259Raghu 258Siva ... Passwords just make themselves...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
1) Choosing a password should be something you do very infrequently.
2) Our focus should be on protecting passwords against informed statistical attacks and not brute-force attacks.
3) When you do have to choose a password, one of the most important selection criteria should be how many other people have also chosen that same password.
4) One of the most impactful things that we can do as a security community is to change password strength meters and disallow the use of common passwords.
XKCD 936 addresses 2 and 3
With four _random_ common words, you have 44 bits of entropy, guaranteed, and no informed statistical attack will change this. OTOH, common password schemes using clever tricks are more vulnerable (Tr0ub4dor&3 only have 28 bits of entropy if the cracker is smart enough). And with 44 bits of entropy, it is unlikely that someone has chosen the same password.
As for strength meters and all this Randall strongly implies that we should focus on length rather than numbers, case and special characters.
Nobody will ever guess Hunter Two!
Find myself disagreeing on virtually all points.
Bottom line in the real world saying no to correct horse battery staple and yes to FcD($*#)@2zJ7&Cd!23 is worse because your asking something unreasonable of your users when a more reasonable solution is available. This doesn't serve to help anyone or make anything more secure.
Wishing everyone use password managers won't make it so nor is it necessarily an ideal solution. Password managers and use of passphrases vs passwords are separate issues and should be treated as such.
The horse battery staple idea is not unreasonable it just isn't complete.
What you want to do is get a memorable text string and then turn it into gibberish using some sort of system.
Take this:
4MhalLwFwwaS4
Looks like gibberish but it is extremely easy to remember with mnemonics.
First:
Mary had a little lamb who's fleece was white as snow.
That is the text string you have to remember.
Then you have rules that turn it from that into gibberish.
So as a test, I had these rules:
1. Take the first letter of every word.
2. Capitalize nouns.
3. cite the number of letters in the first word at the start of string and the number of letters in the last word at the end.
Easy to remember. All you have to do is remember "mary had a little lamb".
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html is information-theoretic AND dictionary-attack resistant when you use enough words and pick them randomly, even if the attacker knows the word list.
You're right only that users should not be CHOOSING passwords (and that's the flaw in correct horse battery staple). Use a Diceware-like technique, which IS secure.
The NSA can, and do, try a trillion passwords per second in an offline attack. Short passwords of any strength will fuck you up.
Trying to defeat the lameness filter by writing shit first.
vi1PcjPanzD7ZSv1ZOgD7sLZNX0qpB0Ypa2fV6gJc46csFi3DN3JqafZPmhWiFxhpik09HVFgDTh3EG
My password is 1234
A password should be:
- random (6 chars or even 6 digits should be enough)
- only being used once per application
- locked after 3 failed attempts in a row. Only to be unlocked after at least 24 hours. And monitor for too many lock-outs!
That's it.
Why should a password have a high complexity? If you can only guess 3 times per day?
And if you are worried about it being reversed via the hash: if the attacker obtained the hash, the security is already broken. The password is then the least of the problem.
”What is there to prevent “letmeinfacebook” from being the new most common four word password for Facebook accounts”
Chance. XKCD 936 says to choose the words at random.
Diogomonica is wrong. And so was Bruce Schneier, and for the same reason – he missed that the words are to be chosen at random.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
This means for example picking a up a few books and selecting pages and words at random. I picked a poetry book and used only words starting with an "o". Not optimal, but nice.
Password managers are better, definitely. So sure, mention the password manager first. But nine out of ten of your readers will not install them. What will you tell them? Nothing?
"Research" done by people who clearly don't read the tooltips.
Try something like "Kim Jong Un did 22 shits in his pants." - easily memorable, has upper case, lower case, numbers and punctuation. It has 186 bits of entropy according to this checker. Even without the spaces "KimJongUndid22shitsinhispants.", it still meets the upper/lower/number/punctuation requirements and has 152 bits of entropy.
and passwords will be written on sticky notes pasted to the underside of keyboards
I think that's the point. Bruce Schneier has been trying to get people to write down passwords for years. Think about it: Unless you're a hardcore Dave Ramsey fanboy, you probably already carrry a plastic card in your wallet with your credit card number embossed on it.
I should update my password to incorrecthorsebatterystaple?
The xkcd idea is a good one for those few passwords you have to remember. But this guy is right - the issue is password managers. I've been railing about this for years. I have two passwords I remember. The other 800 or so I've collected over the years are stored in the password manager. I don't choose the passwords, I let the password manager do that, with the bit slider set to create passwords of 80 to 90 entropy for most things, and greater than 130 for those wanting better security. I've never had an account compromised. We need to train everyone to use password managers now, so that we won't have to put up with annoyances such as multi-factor authentication in the future.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
The random-password tracking tools are great, and they work for a lot of people. But to be used universally, they have to work in 99% of cases, which they're unlikely to. Can you use your favorite one at a library computer? Without your laptop? In a place that forbids USB drives? Without Internet access? It's a similar problem set to why we aren't all using software PKI or GPG email. How do I get the dang keys around to where I am, securely? Here, it's how do I get my password list around to where I am, securely?
The problem with this article is in this sentence:
There is no such thing. A password manager either runs on my PC, which means when I'm away from my PC (laptop at the coffee house) I can't get my passwords; or on a device I have to always have with me, meaning all the inconveniences of a login token -- I can't login when my phone has a dead battery or is lost in the couch cushions or forgotten at home on my desk; or it runs in the "cloud", which would be a security joke.
There is no such thing as a good, or even adequate, password manager for general day-to-day use.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I agree and yet I disagree with the article
I think that the solution to this issue will both overcome true brute force and selected sample attacks (aren't these called rainbow table brute force ? )
I reject the password manager as the default as many people switch between multiple machines some of which are not in their control as such assuming that people own the machines that they use is designing a scheme that does not work for a large number of people. It would be difficult for the multitudes in developing countries that use shared (internet cafe, school etc) computers to get online to implement this scheme.
I agree on changing passwords rarely, but again this depends on the type of use and different users should be able to adjust their behaviour to suit their personal risk profile. For example if I had no choice but to use hotel and airport wifi and access services often I would change my password more frequently than if I only used a machine in the office or at home due to the increased risk from less secure networks and surveillance of my activities.
We are struggling currently to change habits that were introduced 20 years ago. If we make the learning curve too steep we risk the majority finding someway to avoid the process. People tend to ration the mental effort they dedicate to security based on the perceived risk (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity14/sec14-paper-florencio.pdf). If we make the effort too high then they may develop a coping strategy that is not productive.
I think that Diogo Monica makes a very good point. But the implementation should be slow and should follow the widespread adoption of pass phrases. In the meantime, if all (some already do) password assessment tools could give a poor mark to the top ten passwords, and passwords containing the service name, user name or birthdate.
I know people don't like they idea as it slows down things in our lives, but 2 or three factor authentication is the only way to secure things. The fact that online systems that deal in cash and identity information don't use 3 factor is beyond me.
There are only so many characters available if we do not include ascii so given enough time brute force always works.
Systems currently all have their own limitations - 8 charters here and 26 characters there - only letters and numbers and everything goes.
Long passwords have created their own issues on systems and the way hackers can find them -beyond my understanding.
As a user, I hate it when a security rule requires to change password. Why?
The only practical reason why a password would smell is that it is weak and somebody tried to guess it a few times. However, to implement that policy, I'd need to track attempts. Given the number of attempts and an estimate of the entropy, a system can say when it's time to change a password, without inordinate annoyance.
Why isn't it customary to track failed logins per account?
Would users choose better passwords if they were rewarded with proportional expiration times?
Forum passwords need not be strong because they're unimportant, or because nobody actually tries to crack them?
Why do we care about "at least one security researcher," when MOST security researchers (i.e. many many more than one) show actual data on how picking phrases, e.g. three random words, is as good as password protection can be?
Figuring out a better way to create and manage passwords is only a stopgap, and a suboptimal solution at best. What we really need is a straightforward and easy way to use client certificates. You should be able to receive a signed client certificate when you pick up your driver's license. You should be able to receive a signed client certificate when you visit your bank. You should be able to receive a signed client certificate at your local library. Certificate in hand, it should be easy to install that certificate on your devices, with a certificate management system that grandma can use.
The technology is already here, it would eliminate so much of this grief, and set the stage for the next level of secure monetary transactions as well.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Group trying to unlock cell phone. Series comic relief guy says "Give it to me, I can hack it". They do. "OK; 0001. Nope. 0002. Nope. 0003. Nope" etc.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
These are to be known as "insecurity questions" and their answers should always be nonsense that you save in your password manager.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini