131–140 of 168 posts
Why on earth isn't the industry moving away from per-site passwords? They are terrible. The fact that you need your own app to "manage" them is just evidence of how terrible they are. People should be able to use their phones, Yubikey, TouchID, etc. as their authentication, without needing a password (except a master password for the phone/Yubikey/TouchID). And yet I see no movement towards this from the industry. Ar…
Sticking with zx2c4 pass. It is an assembly of gnupg, git, and pwgen. Trusted open source components. Works with a Yubikey (opensc and gpg-agent) to prevent private key theft via software. PassFF extension provides excellent browser integration. Android Password Store and OpenKeychain allow pass and yubikey to work on my mobile. Strong 2 factor password storage everywhere I need it. My biggest problem these days is d…
What is it with banks and their annoyingly terrible "security" requirements? My old bank once sent me an email saying I had to reset my password. The email seemed legit, but upon following the link therein something didn't seem quite right. So I use another device to visit my bank's site directly. Upon trying to login, I get redirected to the same form I reached from the email link and had a sinking realization that…
Sticking with zx2c4 pass. It is an assembly of gnupg, git, and pwgen. Trusted open source components. Works with a Yubikey (opensc and gpg-agent) to prevent private key theft via software. PassFF extension provides excellent browser integration. Android Password Store and OpenKeychain allow pass and yubikey to work on my mobile. Strong 2 factor password storage everywhere I need it. My biggest problem these days is d…
I am pretty sure the code is reusing IVs for AES-CTR[0] (i.e. the encryption is worthless), because it doesn't specify an IV and Node seems to derive the IV from the key.[1] This seems like a massive footgun in Node. I don't think their scheme results in different keys for each site, but I could be wrong. [0] https://github.com/HainaLi/horcrux_password_manager/blob/mas... [1] https://nodejs.org/api/crypto.html#crypto…
Wow. This is yet another example of the fatal combination of Rolling Your Own Crypto + Using OpenSSL Directly And Blowing Your Own Foot Off Because It Lets You. var cipher = crypto.createCipher('aes-256-ctr', key.toString('hex')) Besides the completely fatal error of using derived and non-unique IVs (fatal as in, if you encrypt more than 1 item with it, it is exactly as good as plaintext because any two items encrypt…
1) why CTR mode was chosen? I would probably go with something like GCM: privacy + integrity check.
2) IV ideally should be re-generated on every re-encryption. It doesn't have to be secret, but has to be random (securely random).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is it with banks and their annoyingly terrible "security" requirements? My old bank once sent me an email saying I had to reset my password. The email seemed legit, but upon following the link therein something didn't seem quite right. So I use another device to visit my bank's site directly. Upon trying to login, I get redirected to the same form I reached from the email link and had a sinking realization that…
I've known banks that don't let you change the PIN on their cards - for "security" reasons. And banks with 5-digit maximum password lengths - "oh, it's strong enough, you need to use a token to get money out anyway" ... but not to login.
"The device is a small USB gadget that effectively acts as a SSL proxy, allowing it to have direct and first access to the clear text data to and from the host. It has a small user interface so it can accept (and optionally store) specific user input (PINs, passwords, credit card no, etc) and display specific user/server output data fields. This allows it to insert either pre-stored or on-demand passwords etc. into the outgoing stream. It also allows specific confirmation data fields from the server to be displayed e.g. a beneficiary account no., balance amount, etc.
So the actual passwords are only available in the comms path and PC-side in SSL-encrypted form and any confirmation fields (beneficiary account no., balance amount) are confirmed to the user via the integrated display just before being SSL-encrypted, so they cannot be manipulated before going to the server.
In terms of inserting a password, it automatically detects the standard HTML password form field and the corresponding response message (used by all secure web servers), and substitutes a dummy password for a real one. I have confirmed that this function works on all the major web sites e.g. PayPal, Amazon, E-Bay, Google, LinkedIn, etc. and at least four banks that I have checked (probably most).
For displaying server confirmations, it might require a little help from the host server in terms of detecting the HTML display field, or else it would need to store a profile for each website (not ideal). However, it costs the host service very little to tweak a bit of HTML.
I agree with you whole-heartedly about the user being in the loop. That is what my aim was with this device – The gadget directly authenticates the server through normal SSL and displays the server validity directly to the user via the integrated display. In Internet banking the main threat is the beneficiary account number. As long as the user is satisfied that the account number displayed on the device is correct then it cannot be manipulated other than by breaking the SSL crypto. In this it is almost identical to the IBM ZTIC. The difference is that it also allows the user’s password to be sent securely to the bank and therefore does not require the use of a client cert (so no private key needed)."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One time I found I couldn't log in to my bank account online. Called them up. "Oh, we changed your username as a security measure." Oh. Wait, username??
Typically management at financial institutions see "security reasons" as a quick way to end questioning from a customer. Legacy software or partner integration requirements are almost always the reason for arbitrary changes within financial institution. Anecdotally, I've never seen a scenario myself where this wasn't referred to as a "security measure" or similar. This includes within the institution to all non-techn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. This is yet another example of the fatal combination of Rolling Your Own Crypto + Using OpenSSL Directly And Blowing Your Own Foot Off Because It Lets You. var cipher = crypto.createCipher('aes-256-ctr', key.toString('hex')) Besides the completely fatal error of using derived and non-unique IVs (fatal as in, if you encrypt more than 1 item with it, it is exactly as good as plaintext because any two items encrypt…
As an infosec guy, I'm honestly getting really tired of this. Virtually every time someone submits some new security tool to Hacker News, the author has made trivial, catastrophic, and what should be completely avoidable security mistakes. So for the hundredth time, if you're not a cryptographer or experienced security engineer, please stop releasing and promoting your crypto-related projects before they have been ve…
People seriously need to stop rolling their own crypto.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is KeePass Professional Edition? When I Googled for that the best thing I could find is "Professional Edition" on this page: http://keepass.info/download.html Is that what you mean? It looks like it's written using Mono for non-Windows platforms. I might have shied away for that reason. What platform do you use it on? I'd love to know if it works well on non-Windows platforms (OS X, Linux).
Yes, that's what I'm referring to. I mostly use it on Windows, so I can't really comment on how well it works on MacOS or Linux. My understanding though is that it's basically a straight port, so most of the same functionality should be available. Another option you might want to look at is KeePassXC. It's a fork of KeePassX, and it has built-in (though off-by-default) support for keepasshttp.
Linux: rock solid for several years now. We have several KP databases shared by 20 odd people that contain several thousand entries. I use it on Gentoo and Arch desktops. It runs under Mono plus a few extras to do things like sending links to browsers and autotype etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. This is yet another example of the fatal combination of Rolling Your Own Crypto + Using OpenSSL Directly And Blowing Your Own Foot Off Because It Lets You. var cipher = crypto.createCipher('aes-256-ctr', key.toString('hex')) Besides the completely fatal error of using derived and non-unique IVs (fatal as in, if you encrypt more than 1 item with it, it is exactly as good as plaintext because any two items encrypt…
As an infosec guy, I'm honestly getting really tired of this. Virtually every time someone submits some new security tool to Hacker News, the author has made trivial, catastrophic, and what should be completely avoidable security mistakes. So for the hundredth time, if you're not a cryptographer or experienced security engineer, please stop releasing and promoting your crypto-related projects before they have been ve…