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Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

plaintextoffenders.com

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Re: Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

#141
post #114

I tried to submit a screenshot, but got the error message Sorry, your page had expired. Please try again. on the submission screen. Either they're having trouble (and displaying an unhelpful error message), or they have an awfully short page expiration time - from page load to the time I hit submit was under 30 seconds.

This is a tumblr issue. I think it has something to do with Chrome. Did you use that?

Yes.

Re: Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

#142
post #88
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digest mode has the issue that you need the plaintext password on the server side in order to do the authentication.

You clearly didn't read the link I directed you at. If you had you'd have seen that you only need MD5(username:realm:password), and would have been pointed at JBoss's DIGESTAuth implementation as an example of an implementation that does this.

"You clearly didn't read the link I directed you at." I do believe your tone is rather counterproductive to the purpose of this forum.

I did in fact read the article, and I do now agree that you only need to send MD5(username:realm:password) to the remote server to do the authentication.

The problem that I do see is that it is trivial for a MITM to either intercept the transaction and force the client into a less secure mode (ie. basic auth), and then read in the password, or else just reuse the auth credentials for another transaction.

I would recommend that you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol and the concept of a "zero knowledge password proof" which seems to be the concept you were looking for.

Re: Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

#143
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I think "wut" was a reasonable response. If the browser hashes the password, that just makes the hash the plaintext password. You've accomplished nothing.

Yes, but if we have hash(plaintext + site_specific_salt), then even if I use the same password for different sites and the hash from one of them is intercepted, it still takes a while until the others will also be compromised. I didn't say the system was perfect, but still better than sending the password in plain text.

I believe a similar idea (use hmac(url, password) as a password for websites) is used to great effect by a firefox plugin.

Also, please do not use hash(x + y), use hmacs. String concatenation in hashing breaks some of the complexity guarantees and will lead to your hashes getting cracked faster then you'd expect.

Re: Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

#144
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it was the welcome message, that's not a problem. It's up to you to change it. If they're emailing you your password to root after you've changed it, you might have an issue.

Exactly, I'm using SoftLayer cloud servers and they do the same thing... displaying a cleartext version of the initial root password for the machine. I don't see a way around it. I do have to get that information somehow.

Inject the users public key in as root and have pubkey only logins for root.

Now you are both secure and convenient.

Re: Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

#145
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a public key associated with your email address on a public keyserver, they could encrypt your password—using said key—when you set it, and then store only the encrypted copy. Then, even though they were holding it, the only person who could do anything with it is you :)

Uh... The standard, minimal approach is to keep secure hash of each password and throw away the password itself. This has the same effect but doesn't require the average, unsophisticated user to have a public keep. But that's just the bare minimum approach - from there, you add a "salt" and other things. Done well enough, you should have a system where downloading your entire system shouldn't compromise your users pa…

My point was that you can retain the ability to email the user their own password with no loss of security (provided the user has a public key—like, say, Github or Heroku require, as they use passwordless ssh for repository synchronization.) My point was not that keeping someone's password around, is any better an idea than just allowing them to reset it :)

Re: Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

#146
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it's not a private password if they chose to share it with a group.

What if the group is that person and their dad, and they don't care if their dad knows the password to their gmail?

By definition, there is no point in having an anonymous conversation with your dad, because it wouldn't be anonymous. Right now, we're seeing freeversation used with much larger groups of people, where guessing which email matches the password is impractical, even if someone does reuse a password.

Re: Plain Text Offenders - Did you just email me back my own password?

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent around two years working on some of the highest traffic Wordpress sites out there and I came to the Winston Churchill-like conclusion that Wordpress is the worst blogging platform out there, except for all of the others that have been tried.

I totally disagree, Habari's code base is far superior to wordpress in every regard it simply needs a larger user base. Try it if you are looking for a new blogging platform you'll be pleasantly surprised. http://habariproject.org

I wouldn't argue that Habari is probably better code than WordPress, but it doesn't seem fair to compare a 0.7 product to something as functional and battle-tested as WordPress.
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