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The Best Way To Protect Real Passwords: Create Fake Ones
jfruh writes: Many security-savvy users have a password manager that stores their randomly-generated passwords — but if that manager is cracked, the gig is up. Some security researchers are suggesting a technique to stop this: a password manager that offers up fake passwords when an attacker tries and fails to crack it, which makes the process of figuring out if you've broken in much more difficult.
This just adds an extra step to automate: take the password and try to login. It's not like people are manually trying passwords...
We need a password managers manager!
We need a password managers manager!
... It's password managers all the way down.
I've always heard that SSH keys are better than passwords. So I use them even with websites that don't use SSH.
Here's what I do:
1) I generate a new keypair using ssh-keygen.
2) I put the public key in my GitHub repo, because the public key is meant to be shared.
3) I use the private key as the password when I sign up for a new account on a web site. I copy and paste it into the password input since it's too big for me to type in.
4) When I have to log in to the web site I copy and paste the private key into the password input since it's too big for me to type in.
5) I live my life knowing that I'm using the most secure password possible: an unbreakable SSH key.
Honestly this should be pretty simple. The default operating mode of a password manager should be generate a password from PRNG data.
Store the value encrypted with AES a key derived from a master password extended via PBKDF-2 or similar should be used for the cipher.
Next apply the necessary mixture bitwise rules applied bytewise to the 'clear text' to ensure the password will contain type-able characters and accommodate character restrictions. (Something like x = ((x % 126); x = x | 32 if x 32; for those of us using ascii and yes its not perfect and will produce some bias maybe a crypto expert could propose a better alternative ) Store which rules must be applied as well. That should not be an information leak as the attacker probably can research the target system and divine these requirements anyway.
That will mean most of your passwords are nearly random goblody gook. (Important). No matter what master password is used a key can be derived, the decipher operations and the rules can be applied the result will appear to be a legal password, but it will be incorrect. In the event you have stored a specific less random value it should 'decipher' as well but appear highly random given that is how all your other password appear to be it will not be a strong indicator the wrong key has been chosen either.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
As the maker of a password manager, I'm curious how this is supposed to work. The article is a bit sparse on information.
Suppose I'm the attacker and after say, ten guesses the fake passwords are shown. So if I now save the passwords, will the original ones be overwritten? I guess not, since that would be rather inconvenient. So if not, will the fake passwords along with the master password and the original data be stored in the password database? Than the attacker can check the length of the original file after saving to determine whether he has obtained fake passwords. Or are they assuming some mysterious online password application where the user has no knowledge of where and how his passwords are stored? In that case, the application will be insecure anyway.
I suppose the right way to make this work is by saving fake passwords (or the space for them) along with the real ones all the time but encrypt them separately with the fake master password after it has been created on the fly. Thinking about it, I might add this as an option to my program.
P.S: company eventually got sold to a bigger player and the home grown license manager was retired for industry standard "FlexLm". Soon after, ALL software using Flex were cracked and sold on the warez sites. Pirates could have easily cracked the license manager of that small company, but it is too small to be worth the effort.
Moral of the story: Monoculture is bad, both for Irish potato farmers of the 18th century and license/password managers of the 21st century.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Deception is a valid form of security, similar to obfuscation. It should not be relied upon, but it is merely another layer. In the early 90s me and some buddies ran a multi-node BBS. One of the admins used the same password on another BBS, and someone was able to log into our system using his admin account. So to prevent that from ever happening again, I wrote a script that, for the three site admins, would also ask for their birthdate every time they logged in. If an incorrect date was entered a single time, the account would be locked. Thing is, it wasn't our birthdates that we had to enter, but just another very short password that we could enter really easily. So an attacker, if they got to that point again (obtained the password), would give it their best guess (or perhaps even research to find) the admin's birthdate. If any date was entered at all (containing two slashes or hyphens) the account was immediately locked, because the expected password was just a couple letters is all, and anyone entering an actual date was not an admin.
Better known as 318230.
It's better to ask these questions now, before we do have things to hide, like ebanking info. It's been considered that chip-and-pin would eventually push the liability for lost funds onto the consumer on the assumption that the consumer was negligent in losing his PIN. Bitcoin is another example of a thing that if you lose it, it's gone. It's not mainstream now, but I have heard of the Canadian mint experimenting with encrypted digital copies of it's currency (to allow electronic transactions, but ostensibly to make sure the Canadian government is notified of transactions so they can take a tax cut). It's conceivable you would have little to no recourse in recovering these funds. It's better to have the tools before we need them.
When I was a child:
My parents used to know the phone numbers of every family member off by heart.
When I was a teenager:
I could recite pi to hundreds of decimals places after creating a program that ran on an Amstrad PCW9256 to calculate it (I had to check the answer!), and I still can just from memory. I memorised an entire Shakespeare sonnet just because I needed to for a drama production. I still know it - word-for-word - to this day.
Since then:
I memorise and use dozens of passwords every year. I have separate "levels" so all the really secure stuff with my bank is one set of passwords and all the dross forums I frequent are another. Even if I forget WHICH password it is from the set, I can get it within a couple of goes because I have them all in my head and know what information the site contains about me and, thus, what "level" of password is required.
I unconsciously pick up other people's passwords when they type them in front of me (and I have to ask them not to).
So I have a great memory? No. My memory is atrocious. I forget to phone everyone, I forget what I was doing several times EVERY single day. My girlfriend honestly thinks I have Alzheimer's because I forget so much throughout the day and she knows I'm not just using it as an excuse. I can't learn her native language as my brain can't hold enough of her language to cope.
If I can memorise a handful of passwords, and the average person only needs 5-10 passwords for EVERYTHING altogether, then there's really no excuse. Hell, most of my passwords are muscle-memory and I have to imagine a keyboard to tell you what they actually are.
We all have the capacity to memorise enough information that a password is not worthy of special measures and software to hold it. It's just that we don't bother to do so, whereas we used to (for phone numbers etc.)
I wish i had mod points left :-)
If someone has access to your password management software, and the ability to test out passwords on it and get "the other" passwords back (real or not), then it's a fraction of a portion of a miniscule slice of a second to test whether that password actually DOES anything.
At worst, it'll make it slightly easier to trigger password attempts logins. But at best, something is still brute-forcing your password-management that holds every password you have.
Camouflage works in real life. It doesn't work against computers that are capable of billions of operations a second and can see if there's something under the camouflage within a microsecond.
If anything, just analysing the response pattern of "give the real password" versus "make up some rubbish to feed this spammer" is enough to tell you stuff about the system as a side-channel attack.
Camouflage works by some forms of secrecy only - someone doesn't know you are there. It does not work by there being a hundred camouflaged tank-like things out on the battlefield, 99 of them made of wood, and advertising that fact. Because when you fire the first shot, they know which one is real.
Poor analogies are the worst thing since unsliced bread.