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Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

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Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#451

Post by cm2187 »

danielweber wrote: post #350
cm2187 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That being said md5 does generate collisions. I was playing with the IMDB movie database that you can download. They use a combination of the title and the year as a primary key. I tried using an md5 instead to save space (but giving a reproducible ID instead if an identity column), and got many collisions. No collision with SHA256.

You likely goofed something up. No one has demonstrated two strings that are conceivably used as passwords that users type in -- and that includes the tuple {movie title:year} -- that have MD5 collisions. The security problem with MD5 isn't collisions.

I think you are right, I can't reproduce it.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#452

Post by mypalmike »

Endy wrote: post #248
rbcgerard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL this is rich: "...identified data security issues concerning certain Yahoo user accounts." Certain...more like all up to that point?

Not by several orders of magnitude.

Are you saying yahoo has... trillions of users?

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#454

Post by lucb1e »

dopamean wrote: post #56
chillydawg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloody hell. Sloppy and incompetent.

I'm genuinely curious how the decision to use MD5 gets made. Who says, "hey, maybe we should use MD5." And then who responds, "that sounds like a great idea Bob." Seriously. I've known for years that MD5 is insufficient for hashing passwords and I'm just some random guy. This kind of thing really baffles me.

> I'm genuinely curious how the decision to use MD5 gets made.

You assume a formal decision was made? I think a manager just went "make them secure" and history was made. That's how it usually seems to happen if it's not a user-facing thing.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#455

Post by ticoombs »

ausjke wrote: post #371
Frondo wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that setting up an outbound email server on places like Linode or DO is tricky, because of how likely it is the IP block you're on will be considered spammy. To get around that, I rent a VPS from a local ISP here in Seattle. They have their own equipment, their own IP ranges, etc. It's a bit spendier than Linode but it's not breaking the bank.

good to know that, not sure if aws is better as far as IP-range-blocking is concerned.

Hey just to let you know I host ~300 domains on 1 aws instance. We only have issues when a clients password gets phished, but we also have a limit on the amount of emails per day they can send. So it's never a real issue.

~20,000 emails a day

Going on 4 years. AWS "blocks" are perfectly fine. If you are going to host your own just get your self an Elastic IP and let your account manager know that you intend to send mail. As they (use to? I had to do this 4 years ago) have their own internal anti-spam system which you may hit.

On the contrary I also host my own mail on an instance I have over at [0] which is rock solid and I've had no issues that are not the fault of my own. I would recommend at minimum.

The only thing I can say is if you want to do email yourself possibly use [1] for an easy to setup system and make sure you get a box with minimum 512mB of RAM or around 1GB because ClamAV is fat.

Or go [2] for a hosted solution. Who are doing great things regarding encrypted mail.

[0] https://www.prometeus.net/billing/aff.php?aff=157

[1] http://redmail.com/

[2] https://protonmail.com

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#456

Post by johnchristopher »

Arubis wrote: post #165

Fittingly, attempting to change my password to a 32-character random string generated by 1Password returns an error that the password "cannot contain my email or username", regardless of the contents of that random string (I tried several). It does, however, _happily_ accept `passwordpassword` and cheerily move along to confirming that my recovery email account from 2003 is still valid.

Last time I tried changing my Yahoo password it took me days before it accepted something (and I had password generator scripts and my brain). Now it's back to something along the lines of `letmein`.

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#457

Post by amenghra »

bschwindHN wrote: post #443
kijin wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could SHA256 the original password and feed the hash to bcrypt. Remember to use the 64-byte hexadecimal hash, not the 32-byte binary because bcrypt chokes on null bytes. Everyone's been saying "just use bcrypt", but bcrypt has too many gotchas to be the default choice. We really need to work on getting scrypt and argon2 into the most popular programming languages and frameworks a.s.a.p.

Is "just use scrypt" an acceptable answer then? I'm not a security expert and I don't know the advantages of one over the other.

Yes, scrypt is a perfectly fine password hash.

If you are currently using something else (say salted md5 or even just plain md5), you can migrate your passwords to scrpyt(current_hash()) without having to change everyone's password and/or wait for everyone to log in.

See also this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12549110

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#458

Post by libeclipse »

jensvdh wrote: post #425
XorNot wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hash the password locally (you are serving JavaScript over SSL right?) and only send the SHA256.

Never trust the client.

I can't think of any security implications of hashing on the client-side. What's your thinking?

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#459

Post by wtfishackernews »

throwaway34916 wrote: post #156
stanleydrew wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo has been a company for a long time. I imagine your conversation happened round about 1999 when using MD5 wasn't insane. And then they were just slow to upgrade. It's still bad, I'm just saying the conversation about what hash algo to use didn't happen yesterday.

I'd like to believe that. However, I was recently asked to test a new website for an organization I volunteer for, and discovered their "forgot password" flow emailed me my plaintext password. I wrote an explanation of why this was bad, and how it could be fixed, to a non-technical friend of mine who works there; he passed my email to the (Bay Area based!) consulting shop that did their website. The shop sent this re…

submit the website to http://plaintextoffenders.com/

Re: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

#460

Post by 234dd57d2c8db »

mlangdon wrote: post #272
234dd57d2c8db wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... "offshore workers" are not a race. You realize offshore workers could be the same race as the person posting right?

This is technically true, which is the best kind of true. Swap in nationalist, chauvinist. It's utterly clear what was meant by racism above, in spite of your semantics.

Racist is the laziest argument ever and it's diluting the word. If people were more accurate about describing problems, their criticisms wouldn't be dismissed to easily.

A perfect example is Donald Trump. Every argument about Trump became "he's a racist!!11", which caused people to ignore and focus on the wrong problems with him! There was a lot of negatives to Trump, and yet everyone just said "Racist, boom I don't need to argue any more!"

People started ignoring completely legit arguments because the racist angle was so overplayed. I'm sick of hearing racist as the end-all be-all argument. It doesn't work anymore, the card is overplayed. The only place it still works is in liberal bubbles. (Note I'm socially liberal, fiscal conservative moderate, no dog in this race)

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