Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you give an example of how it is possible to take over an email account just by having an e-mail conversation with the owner?
I imagine he/she is referring to how most "security questions" use info that we typically don't hesitate to give out in casual conversation, even with total strangers.
The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
231–240 of 450 posts
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#232I always assumed that the reason paste is disabled on change password forms is to prevent you from changing it to something you don't know. The whole point of making you type it twice is so that you get it right. If you type the password once and paste it twice, that is moot. Not that I necessarily agree with that notion (just make it easy for me to change it again) but that's the idea. I thought.
And that's exactly the point of OP. You can only "know" weak passwords. Disabling paste is assuming and forcing people to use weak passwords.
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#233It always amazes me that someone is hired to implement strong security and they come up with things like paste-blocking. Or "security questions." Security questions are a social engineers best friend. Unless you're savvy and your answers are all strong passwords themselves, and if they are you're probably using keepass or something like it with 400+ bit passwords and you hate wasting time on security questions too.
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
The attacker needs to both be able to read the page and key log every keystroke and be able to associate as single letter, digit, or symbol to you password and not only that to the correct placement within the password. This is virtually impossible to achieve by any effective means. They ask random characters from your password in a random order if you login into your bank twice a week it most likely will a year or m…
> This is virtually impossible to achieve by any effective means. Actually it's very simple to achieve. First, those digits will not be randomly placed among all the things you've typed, but they'd follow some specific patterns (the most obvious one being you typing all of part --due to autocomplete-- of the bank's url). (Of course if you can run a keylogger you can also check what website is loaded on the browser an…
Such attacks rely on large scales rather than being targeted.
If you target a specific account there are much better attacks out there to do if you target specific individuals or organizations.
Yes this isn't the best method and I've had and still have a lot of objections to it (it requires the password to be stored in a reversible encryption, but that is also sadly a regulatory requirement).
But I've tested it a 10 character password using their random characters random order request method took at the least 413 (that was the lowest in my case, I didn't run a full statistical analysis on it) login requests. This is because that asking for 1st 2nd and 3rd characters, and 2nd 1st and 3rd, and 3rd, 2nd and 1st etc. are all considered "different" authentication requests by the bank.
Your keylogger would have to be also able to read the page and know that the 1st box wants the 4th character and the 2nd box wants the 3rd and the 3rd want's the 7th. This isn't that trivial, and this doesn't scale for an attack that can target 10,000's of users over a short time period.
You need to understand that banks constantly change their web pages, they monitor for bank related malware and some of them even use additional protection like for example randomizing the names of the input fields and even the number of the fields to make effective keylogging with full browser compromise even harder.
You also are incorrect when assuming that if i know the 1st 3 characters of a password it somehow helps me it doesn't because you do not have an authentication mechanism to brute force against there isn't some login page that takes the full password, and 3 incorrect login attempt lock your user and require you to initiate a recovery by phone or by visiting a branch.
This system overall is pretty good at preventing direct attacks against the bank's own system, it's resilient to phishing, brute forcing is not an option, and a keylogger can be active for 1-2 years without effectively getting the password. Effective security isn't black and white, there are is a lot of grey areas that might seem asinine and many of them are but they do work when you have the proper mitigating controls.
But let's ignore all of what we've established so far and go back to your assertion you assert that this attack is effective against high value accounts / individuals. Well that's great, because from the point of view of the bank it says hey look we've put in a control that can effectively protect 99% of our users, let's see what can we do to protect the 1%. That's how you achieve good security, you don't pool everyone into the same group, accounts with an average balance of 5000$ do not have the same risk portfolio as accounts with an average balance of 1M$. Differential security and risk management is how you apply effective security on very large groups, you employ shared controls that cover the basics and add mitigating controls based on the individual risk portfolios for each sub group.
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
HSBC doesn't do that any more for me -- they've moved to a Google Authenticator-like 2FA approach[1], but Lloyds[2] does - they have one username and password, and a "memorable phrase" which they clearly store as plaintext because ask for the xth, yth and zth character as a secondary security measure. Lloyds tech folk reading this -- please consider fixing this. [1] http://i.imgur.com/QCGPDWz.png [2] http://i.imgur.c…
Why cant they just also hash those three letter combinations they ask you? Not nearly as secure but I see many people saying that the plaintext must be stored to achieve this, and all I am thinking is that it would require you to store multiple hashes for each user, each a portion of their password. Still a lot easier to guess a portion of a password than a password, but it doesnt follow in my mind that it is definit…
However this is a memorable phrase (not password), similar to a security question. These are not generally hashed because customer service uses them to confirm authorization to reset a password.
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reason it works is that all inhabitants are given a personal identification number upon birth Isn’t that the same as the Social Security/National Insurance number you get in various countries? In France you have a unique number that depends on your sex, where you’re born, 3 more digits to differentiate you from all other people of the same sex that were born the same day at the same place and then a final digit…
SSN's in the US are not unique, though they are only used by one person at a time.
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can get/set HTMLInputElement.value on [type="password"] anyway so if you wanted to shim the PW field copy/paste functionality back, you could just create a bookmarklet or something. Edit, threw an example together. Ignore the horrible code ;P Http://jsfiddle.net/6gc2d6hb Type in one of the PW fields then double-click it. Doesn't overwrite populated PW fields.
And once again, we find ourselves inspecting elements to fix someone's brilliant idea.
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
HSBC doesn't do that any more for me -- they've moved to a Google Authenticator-like 2FA approach[1], but Lloyds[2] does - they have one username and password, and a "memorable phrase" which they clearly store as plaintext because ask for the xth, yth and zth character as a secondary security measure. Lloyds tech folk reading this -- please consider fixing this. [1] http://i.imgur.com/QCGPDWz.png [2] http://i.imgur.c…
Why cant they just also hash those three letter combinations they ask you? Not nearly as secure but I see many people saying that the plaintext must be stored to achieve this, and all I am thinking is that it would require you to store multiple hashes for each user, each a portion of their password. Still a lot easier to guess a portion of a password than a password, but it doesnt follow in my mind that it is definit…
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#239The worst is websites which not only disable pasting but don't even let you type your password in. Instead you have to use their janky on-screen keyboard to fumble your way through login. I got so fed up with TradeKing (which has horrible security practices in general) that I close my account.
Re: The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's still not a very good reason. If you're security conscious, you shouldn't be typing passwords at all. You should generate them from a password manager and paste them into the field both times. It boils down to security theater making us all less secure.
As someone running a user-facing site, you cannot control whether your users use password managers. So what's your solution? Just disregard the segment of your users who don't use password managers? That's a tradeoff that you might not want to make, depending on your business. Also, if you're someone who uses a password manager, does disabling pasting really make you less secure? I assume you're still generating pass…
No. But, consider that the segment of your users who don't use password managers is also very likely 100% intersecting with the segment of your users who do not ever attempt to paste a password into a password field.
So by blocking paste you have zero effect on the users you wish would improve their password practices, and a 100% negative effect on the set of users who are creating and using secure passwords.