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"Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

troyhunt.com

31–40 of 369 posts

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#31

Bit off topic, but I was searching for a better way to manage passwords a few weeks ago (rather than have 1 or 2 master passwords across all websites). I found KeePass through an old ask HN thread. It's a great little free, open source key/password storage app that works across all my devices (iOS, macOS, windows). https://keepass.info/ I'd be interested to hear any suggestions for similar apps I could recommend to m…

I was looking at Dashlane which seemed to have some good features, including some ability to do password rotation automatically, and some level of yubikey support. That said I'm still using keepass. I discovered it when I needed a solution that worked on an original Surface RT, as well as an iphone, and I've remained happy.

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#33

do not skip the section on "Cloudflare, Privacy and k-Anonymity" ... it is a great summary of an elegant privacy solution. And check out Cloudflare's detail post too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with...

I'm a bit confused - why not distribute a serialized Bloom filter representing these passwords? That would seem to enable a compact representation (low Azure bill) and client-side querying (maximally preserving privacy).

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#35
post #21

On the topic of passwords, have a look at my command-line passphrase generation program. GitHub: https://github.com/ctsrc/pgen It's written in Rust. Install the Rust toolchain installer from https://rustup.rs/ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh And remember to add ~/.cargo/bin to your PATH. Then install my command-line utility cargo install pgen Usage is described in detail in the README on GitHub. Additionally you…

personally I've always just done: and picked a bit I liked

Picking the bit you like makes it hard to reason about how secure that is. It could be your preferences are much narrower than you realise. If you're going for something you find aesthetically pleasing or memorable then that's probably going to seriously limit password entropy. On the other hand if you're trying to pick something that "looks random" then you should know humans are terrible at that.

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#36

On the topic of passwords, have a look at my command-line passphrase generation program. GitHub: https://github.com/ctsrc/pgen It's written in Rust. Install the Rust toolchain installer from https://rustup.rs/ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh And remember to add ~/.cargo/bin to your PATH. Then install my command-line utility cargo install pgen Usage is described in detail in the README on GitHub. Additionally you…

That looks like a decent tool but I wonder about its use case. The passwords are far too long to be entered on anything without a dedicated keyboard and you'd not want to be typing them in too often.

Sure, there are some use cases that fit but there's many more that don't.

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#37

Bit off topic, but I was searching for a better way to manage passwords a few weeks ago (rather than have 1 or 2 master passwords across all websites). I found KeePass through an old ask HN thread. It's a great little free, open source key/password storage app that works across all my devices (iOS, macOS, windows). https://keepass.info/ I'd be interested to hear any suggestions for similar apps I could recommend to m…

I've tried to get my mom to use KeePass with limited success. To her having her easily guessable passwords written in a little notebook next to the computer is fine. I think a prerequisite is getting buy in on the idea that passwords need to be treated like the keys to your house or your bank account numbers.

As far as I'm concerned writing passwords in a notebook in a draw or something is fine. The easily guessable part not so much. If someone has physical access to your computer in the first place there's lots of things they could do.

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#38

do not skip the section on "Cloudflare, Privacy and k-Anonymity" ... it is a great summary of an elegant privacy solution. And check out Cloudflare's detail post too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with...

Can you clarify what problem this solves?

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#39
I'm going to have to disagree with the premise that sites should stop users from choosing a password which happens to have been cracked offline at some point in the past -- to the tune of blacklisting half a billion potential secrets.

What exactly is the end goal, and at what cost? Well, there are 3 ways to steal a password. You can steal it from the user -- either by phishing or with malware -- in which case it matters not a bit how complex the password is. You could attempt to crack it online, that is, by attempting to login as the user through the front door. In this case, a simple counter should limit the number of attempts before a second factor is required, such as clicking a link in an email, and a list of half a billion candidates isn't going to help here either. Finally, you can steal the password verifier database and attempt to crack the password offline.

So, the theory must be that passwords in a known attacker's dictionary are more likely to be used as candidates in an offline attack. This is likely true. But once the verifier database is stolen, if an attacker is able to run the password hashing function, then every password which is not raw entropy already must be assumed to be cracked. Regardless of how hostile your password policy is. So what exactly is this policy saving you?

On the flip side, it's reasonable to ask, what would such a policy cost you? It's hard to say without actual data, but I'd love to see some data on what percentage of candidate passwords offered by a user trying to signup on their mobile device would be rejected under this policy? How many attempts on average would it take a user to find a password which was not rejected? And what's the increase in bounce rate, and therefore lost signups, that would result? How many increased password resets would be required from users choosing passwords that they inevitably don't remember? How many additional lock-outs which require customer support capital to resolve?

Password policies on average are pretty horrendous. But password policies which are arbitrary black boxes to the end user are about the worst you can find. Sitting on my mobile device, not knowing if a chosen password will be accepted, having to type it twice each time, is a wretched user experience which would need extremely lofty benefits to outweigh the cost. I fail to see any benefits to this approach which couldn't be solved with better hashing which wouldn't impact the user experience whatsoever.

I'll say one more thing on the idea of blacklists. Users just trivially work around them. Password quality (entropy, guessability) does not generally increase. Bad password policies often decrease password quality, particularly in the case of password expiry. But a frustrating opaque blacklist could be just as bad. (I'm not aware of any studies on this).

An attacker who knows a particular blacklist was in place will use munging rules to find derivatives from the master list which are not on the blacklist. How much will their crack rate (percentage of clears recovered from an offline attack of a given magnitude) be affected? But more importantly, potentially driving down the crack rate through user hostile password policies is a game which has huge dividends at first (getting a password which can't be attacked online) and very little dividends after that point.

Disclaimer: Founder of BlindHash, which is the "better hashing" I refer to above.

Re: "Pwned Passwords" V2 With Half a Billion Passwords

#40
post #35
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

personally I've always just done: and picked a bit I liked

Picking the bit you like makes it hard to reason about how secure that is. It could be your preferences are much narrower than you realise. If you're going for something you find aesthetically pleasing or memorable then that's probably going to seriously limit password entropy. On the other hand if you're trying to pick something that "looks random" then you should know humans are terrible at that.

"picked a bit I liked" means selecting a length suitable for the site without any weird characters that the site will reject, not trying to find my place of birth in the output!
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