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'Username or Password is Incorrect' Security Defense is a Weak Practice (hackernoon.com)

Posted by msmash on from the challenging-the-norms dept.

Travis Jeffery, writing for HackerNoon: There's a security best practice where sign ins aren't supposed to say "password is incorrect." Instead they're supposed to say the "username or password is incorrect." This "best practice" is bullshit. Stripe's and GitHub's sign ins for example follow this practice. The idea is if an attacker knows a username, he or she could concentrate on that account using SQL injection, brute forcing the password, phishing, and so on. Here's the problem. All a hacker has to do is sign up to know whether the username is valid or not. Why bother then with obfuscating the sign in? Only the dumbest, laziest hacker is stopped by the "username or password is incorrect" sign in. You gain no security, yet your customers lose clarity. Stripe has their form submission behind reCAPTCHA to prevent naive scripts attacking their sign up. However this has been broken multiple times and likely won't ever be perfect. Even if reCAPTCHA was perfect, a hacker could manually validate their usernames of interest by trying to sign up, then automate an attack on the sign in page.

6 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Except by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The user may have entered either the password OR username incorrectly. So saying "password is incorrect" could be misleading.

  2. Unless... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's no publicly available 'sign up' option.

    1. Re:Unless... by MightyYar · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The other thing is I may not want people knowing whether or not I have signed up for a service... Does MightyYar have an account at BigFatBootyMamas? Yes, yes he does. I don't care if you can sign in and see the beautiful ladies on my dime, but I don't want it to be easy for people to check my email address against random websites looking for where I have accounts.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  3. Non sequitur. by msauve · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Only the dumbest, laziest hacker is stopped by the "username or password is incorrect" sign in. You gain no security, yet your customers lose clarity."

    By your own admission, you gain, at the very least, security from dumb, lazy hackers.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  4. IT Security Theater by Comboman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are plenty of IT "Best Practices" that have been proven useless of just plain wrong. Forcing users to change passwords regularly just trains them to use insecure passwords. Forcing upper and lower case just trains users to always capitalize their password. Forcing numbers & punctuation just trains users to adopt the standard replacements (a = @, e = 3, etc). All of it is just an excuse to blame the victim when a breach inevitably happens.

    --
    Support Right To Repair Legislation.
  5. Very short sighted by Kincaidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "a hacker could manually validate their usernames of interest by trying to sign up, then automate an attack on the sign in page." The fuck? He drops that like it's trivial. The whole point is not allowing to blast usernames until you find one that exists. You throttle EVERYTHING. Signups from an IP. Logins from an IP. Login attempts to a specific account. Everything has throttles. I think the author is seriously off on their reasoning.