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The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

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Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#151
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one at least makes some sort of sense; it's designed to prevent keyloggers from reading your password when you type it in. You can just MiTM the connection though.

Modern keyloggers track mouse and take screenshots on clicks.

It still doesn't work when the bank asks for different characters the next time you connect.

Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly why all my e-mail passwords are at least 18 character long with random generated gibberish stored on a keychain... And to secured that keychain I use a very long login password (XKCD style + numbers) that always make people cringe. In return I assert a well deserved facepalm when I see a friend log in on his e-mail account with a variation of "Password1".

That sounds like a very tedious thing to go through to login to your email. Just use a strong password ( https://xkcd.com/936/ ) The funny thing with having email as a username is, how sometimes people can use social engineering to gain control of your account, non of that fancy "hoaxer" stuff are needed when your service providers put untrained people in charge of your accounts. Hacking human stupidity is a more eff…

Nope I mean I kinda never login to my mail through unknown browser. My smartphone is just good enough when I can't access my computer, so there is only three places where my long e-mail password is stored. Keychain on my computer, keychain on my smartphone and backed up encrypted keychain in my cloud account. So it's highly unlikely that my e-mails get compromised.

Also worth mentioning my e-mails are not hosted on gmail or any big cloud player. I actually pay for my imap, when you don't pay you probably in some way are the product...

Paranoid? Maybe

Safe? More than others

Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#155

Is there a way to disable just pieces of JS, so I can turn off "onpaste"? note: sorry, accidentally deleted earlier version of this comment.

Javascript injection returns quite a few hits. For example for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/css-and-javascript...

Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#156

Is there a way to disable just pieces of JS, so I can turn off "onpaste"? note: sorry, accidentally deleted earlier version of this comment.

Found Stack Overflow discussion with some suggestions:

http://superuser.com/questions/858082/how-can-i-selectively-...

Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#157

I have a crazy idea: what if we held people responsible for their own mistakes, instead of turning the world into a padded room? You messed up your password? Reset it. You have a virus / XSS that is slurping the clipboard? It's probably logging keystrokes too, and that's not the devs problem (well, XSS is, but blocking paste isn't the solution)

Why do you want to punish people even more instead of trying to educate them and help them? You and me probably do not make mistakes in this subject: but we have to admit we are both lucky and got enough education/insights to be able to handle security 'right'. Most of the population are not that lucky.

Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#158

I have a crazy idea: what if we held people responsible for their own mistakes, instead of turning the world into a padded room? You messed up your password? Reset it. You have a virus / XSS that is slurping the clipboard? It's probably logging keystrokes too, and that's not the devs problem (well, XSS is, but blocking paste isn't the solution)

I agree that the security theater is annoying, and uselsess, but I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion.

Sometime in the 1960s we realized that we can't reduce fatal car accidents by "holding people accountable for their own mistakes". We actually have to make cars safer.

Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#159
post #8

Fortunately, it's not hard to get around this on desktop (for Mac at least) with an applet like Paste Typer. But when I see this on iOS it infuriates me. I use 1Password to generate strong (long) passwords and having to type them out manually is a huge PIA.

On Android, KeePassDroid registers as a keyboard to prevent other apps from retrieving your passwords from the clipboard. Not super familiar with iOS, but it seems like a good practice anyway, independent of its utility in circumventing asinine "no pasting" policies.

1Password does too but I've found that the Chase app and the Google Account manager all fail silently when using the keyboard to paste in your password. I called up Chase and they had no idea about why it wasn't working, although they could see my login attempts.

I only was able to figure it out when I changed my gmail password to something stronger and couldn't log back in and had to google the problem.

Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could be extracting the 1st, 6th and 7th characters, concat them and storing the hash (+salt) of the resulting string. That way they can check equality without storing the plaintext password. You could extend this by storing the hash of all 3-letter combinations of the password on entry. Then ask for a random combination of 3-letters.

You realize that this is trivial to brute force, though.

No. You limit to 3 attempts per user before you go to the bank to show ID.

Why do hacker news people think they are better at security than multi billion dollar banks?

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