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How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

cynosureprime.blogspot.com

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Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#111

Post by jandrese »

artursapek wrote: post #103
djrogers wrote: post #100

The real lesson here is that when you fix your mistakes, go back and fix your mistakes retroactively! AM used an insecure login token at one point, and 3 years ago they fixed it. They switched from an MD5 of lower(pass)+username to an MD5 of the bcrypted pass+username, which is no longer reversible. Apparently they never updated all of the previous login tokens though, so anyone who had created an account before the…

Updating them retroactively requires those users to log in again, doesn't it? I have had to do a similar update and you can't just update everyone's hashes retroactively. If you've properly hashed it, you need them to actually input their password again.

The proper solution would have been to flag the old passwords and require everyone to change them on the next login. After a couple of months you null out the remaining passwords and require anybody coming back to go through the password reset system.

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#112

Post by encoderer »

heynk wrote: post #104
djrogers wrote: post #100

The real lesson here is that when you fix your mistakes, go back and fix your mistakes retroactively! AM used an insecure login token at one point, and 3 years ago they fixed it. They switched from an MD5 of lower(pass)+username to an MD5 of the bcrypted pass+username, which is no longer reversible. Apparently they never updated all of the previous login tokens though, so anyone who had created an account before the…

I thought the standard way of migrating your PW hashing function was that you could only do it during a login, because that's the only time you have the PW in plain text. No?

No, you just take the original MD5 of lower(pass)+username and run that thru your new bcrypt. You will have a more complicated authentication process but it's worth it.

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#113

Post by sparkystacey »

lostgame wrote: post #74

I used to work for these guys. Their CEO was probably the single most selfish douchebag I'd ever met. Glad this happened to them. 'bout time Karma came a'knocking. Oh, p.s. can confirm all women (at least 90%) are bots.

How many are bots overall?

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#115

Post by mizzao »

djrogers wrote: post #100

The real lesson here is that when you fix your mistakes, go back and fix your mistakes retroactively! AM used an insecure login token at one point, and 3 years ago they fixed it. They switched from an MD5 of lower(pass)+username to an MD5 of the bcrypted pass+username, which is no longer reversible. Apparently they never updated all of the previous login tokens though, so anyone who had created an account before the…

Maybe another lesson is that security by obscurity is never going to work in this age. If someone steals your code, which is incredibly likely with the amount of digital infiltration happening constantly, your security mechanism still better be safe.

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#116

Post by rnovak »

Someone1234 wrote: post #108
rnovak wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, lets be fair here. Saying "Don't roll your own encryption" doesn't specify "maths" or "applied crypto" (which incidentally covers security/auth mechanisms). It's a bad idea to roll your own versions of either the maths part or the applied part, so I don't think the GP was inaccurate in his statement.

I agree with what you're saying, I just don't understand how it applies here. Tons of people have created broken versions of popular encryption schemes. They go to Wikipedia, get the AES algorithm, and then implement it. That implementation turns out to be flawed, and by "rolling their own encryption" even if it is based on a very secure one, like AES, they have been incorrectly encrypting content. But that doesn't a…

I guess I'm just use to hearing "crypto" used as a term that means both the applied part, as well as the math part, so whenever I see someone else say "don't roll your own crypto", I assume they mean everything from the primitives used all the way to how they used them. Sorry for the confusion

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#117

Post by icebraining »

amelius wrote: post #91

The article assumes that the reader knows what MDXfind is. Can somebody explain? Is it a brute force tool?

From searching a little, it seems it's a hash cracker that can crack many types of hashes (MD5, SHA, etc) from the same file.

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#118

Post by mr_sturd »

mikejarema wrote: post #85
mr_sturd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second nilved's suggestion of KeePass . The database is encrypted and stored on the local machine. I currently use Syncthing to share it between my devices.

Likewise, I'm very happy with this exact setup after coming from a mix of memorized password and site-dependent password-generation schemes. I'm on Mac and found KeePassX to be a better solution than the original KeePass, it's much lighter weight. My only hope is that KeePassX gets browser integration at some point via keepasshttp - https://www.keepassx.org/dev/issues/91

Ah KeePassHTTP would be lovely on Android, too, but I'll live with temporarily stashing the passwords in my clipboard for the time being.

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#119

Post by yk »

artursapek wrote: post #103
djrogers wrote: post #100

The real lesson here is that when you fix your mistakes, go back and fix your mistakes retroactively! AM used an insecure login token at one point, and 3 years ago they fixed it. They switched from an MD5 of lower(pass)+username to an MD5 of the bcrypted pass+username, which is no longer reversible. Apparently they never updated all of the previous login tokens though, so anyone who had created an account before the…

Updating them retroactively requires those users to log in again, doesn't it? I have had to do a similar update and you can't just update everyone's hashes retroactively. If you've properly hashed it, you need them to actually input their password again.

Depends, if your old hash is H1, then you can migrate to a scheme H2(H1(password)), with a second hash H2, provided H1 is not too broken.

Re: How we cracked millions of Ashley Madison passwords

#120

Post by amelius »

icebraining wrote: post #117
amelius wrote: post #91

The article assumes that the reader knows what MDXfind is. Can somebody explain? Is it a brute force tool?

From searching a little, it seems it's a hash cracker that can crack many types of hashes (MD5, SHA, etc) from the same file.

Ok, so it is a brute force tool, with some dictionary-based heuristics, I suppose.
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