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Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

donjon.ledger.com

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Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#91
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've been wondering for a long time is how do these two passwords compare: hiKxChDiaHNAtgVz vis-à-vis : kähdikyylkönekkimahdakerttaksa One is a 16 random `[a-zA-Z0-9]` characters, the other is a 32 character long nonce word, containing and among others that conforms to Finnish phonology, but otherwise is devoid of any meaning and phonology but easier to remember to speakers of Finnish. One is a 16. Does 32 char…

I wonder if the xkcd comic about this is still accurate, being that it's generally safer to have longer passwords regardless of how it's formatted. https://xkcd.com/936/ I recently signed up for a ticketing website to buy tickets for a concert and was appalled that the site wouldn't accept my 50+ character generated password... I had to enter something between 8 and 15 characters. Still seems to me that "^Zh7*2wNfRG7…

> I wonder if the xkcd comic about this is still accurate, being that it's generally safer to have longer passwords regardless of how it's formatted.

Indeed, that is what I am wondering. If the double length offsets that it is not random.

Twice the length is quite a lot, but it's also not random any more.

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second password can fail quite quickly assuming an attacker is going to target Finnish words to perform a dictionary attack, perhaps a Finnish website makes sense for something like this to be done. Psuedo-random is always better because anything else usually follows a pattern that can be exploited(sequence, structure, words, statistical bias) If we can't make assumptions about the secret, the only solution is pl…

As I said; it's not a word. It isn't a word and has no actual meaning or morphology; it's comparable to something such as: wrockrangnattentamploozakoshal It conforms to Finnish orthography and phonology, but otherwise not a word.

It seems to be though that it is consisted of some structured elements(I don't know much about Finnish orthography\honology)

So if it has some predictable structure, statistical attributes etc, it can be exploited to reduce the search space and therefore can be weaker than the actual raw entropy.

Does that matter in the real world? I don't think so.

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#93
post #47
post #42

To me, using a Password Manager puts you at risk, no matter which one you use. I cannot speak to windows, but on Linux, I use a encrypted text file via emacs. And to generate passwords: tr -cd "[:alnum:]" And a real TL;DR: Upgrade your Kaspersky Password Manager

How does that encrypted text file put you less at risk than a password manager? A password manager might have extra features such as browser plugins that provide a larger attack surface, but they can be switched off entirely. So, if you use more functionality than the encrypted text file, you might have more risk, fair enough, but when you use the same functionality, the risk seems comparable (or even: a password man…

Mainly I am in control of it, not a company that may or may not have access to what you are doing.

For example, that company may not be able to see your passwords. But they probably can see the servers/sites the passwords are for and maybe the hash.

I will not even speak about all the break-ins that seem to be occurring on CLoud Systems.

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said; it's not a word. It isn't a word and has no actual meaning or morphology; it's comparable to something such as: wrockrangnattentamploozakoshal It conforms to Finnish orthography and phonology, but otherwise not a word.

It seems to be though that it is consisted of some structured elements(I don't know much about Finnish orthography\honology) So if it has some predictable structure, statistical attributes etc, it can be exploited to reduce the search space and therefore can be weaker than the actual raw entropy. Does that matter in the real world? I don't think so.

Yes it can, so I wonder if the double length offsets that.

I would assume that assuming an attacker knows that it is nonce Finnish, that he would be able to craft a specific algorithm that is faster than 32 random character for specifically this, but that in practice if he not know that with all modern approaches it is æquivalent to attempting to bruteforce 32 characters, giving priority to letters and vowels, especially with the inclusion of and .

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#95
post #4

I feel like the discussion about uniform password generation and PRNG, while interesting, is relatively irrelevant here. Even a garbo xorshift-based non uniform PRNG is almost certainly good enough to generate strong random passwords, as long as it's seeded correctly. An attacker is unlikely to gather enough output (generated passwords) to predict other ones, and the passwords are unlikely to be all generated within…

What's wrong with seeding with time so long as you do it with nanoseconds?

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#97
post #50
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what is your point here. There is an unbroken contiunity of CheKa/NKVD/MGB/KGB/FSB.

I'm not sure what you try to proof with your picture and kaspersky. >There is an unbroken contiunity of CheKa/NKVD/MGB/KGB/FSB Same could be said about OSS -> CIA right? >Kaspersky's Advanced School of KGB graduation Then this can't be an official Name right?

That was the official name at his time of graduation, and the school is still the Russian security service primary institution.

> I'm not sure what you try to proof with your picture and kaspersky.

Oh, only that his link to Russian secret services is not ephemeral. He is still a bloody state security reserve officer.

Now of course there is no way of proving if this vulnerability was planted or merely a poor implementation. However to think that Kaspersky Labs has no substantial embedding of FSB is incredibly naive, it's simply not how things work in Russia (even if the CEO isn't an FSB reservist).

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#98
post #37

Ok, we know that Math.random() is bad, and they recommend using window.crypto.getRandomValues(). But the docs for getRandomValues() raise concerns too: - getRandomValues() is not guaranteed to be running in a secure context. - There is no minimum degree of entropy mandated by the Web Cryptography specification - User agents are instead urged to provide the best entropy they can when generating random numbers, using a…

There is no better solution for the client-side web. getRandomValues() generates cryptographically secure random bytes in all current popular browsers.

Side question: what are cryptographically secure random bytes? I assume that with random bytes all we care about is that they are random. And since it's impossible to tell if any finite sized output is random or not, I suppose we simply show randomness with statistical significance tests. But how, precisely?

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#99
post #4

I feel like the discussion about uniform password generation and PRNG, while interesting, is relatively irrelevant here. Even a garbo xorshift-based non uniform PRNG is almost certainly good enough to generate strong random passwords, as long as it's seeded correctly. An attacker is unlikely to gather enough output (generated passwords) to predict other ones, and the passwords are unlikely to be all generated within…

What's wrong with seeding with time so long as you do it with nanoseconds?

That's not the case here, and even then why bother when modern operating systems have ways to easily get you good quality entropy? If you use a decent random library you won't have to bother reinventing the wheel.

I had to generate a 20 char random key string in Rust the other day, I just wrote:

        rand::thread_rng()
            .sample_iter(&Alphanumeric)
            .take(20)
            .map(char::from)
            .collect()
There. Uniform, decent entropy, explicit, simple.

Re: Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us

#100
post #4

I feel like the discussion about uniform password generation and PRNG, while interesting, is relatively irrelevant here. Even a garbo xorshift-based non uniform PRNG is almost certainly good enough to generate strong random passwords, as long as it's seeded correctly. An attacker is unlikely to gather enough output (generated passwords) to predict other ones, and the passwords are unlikely to be all generated within…

What's wrong with seeding with time so long as you do it with nanoseconds?

You likely can't get a safe amount of entropy from the available resolution in time.

For example, even assuming nanoseconds, that's only log(10^9) bits of entropy if you can guess what second (not that hard, may even be public). That's nowhere near enough.

I'd also doubt that many ways you try to get a nanosecond resolution time actually have that resolution, there's probably discrete steps of lower resolution.

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