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A decade of Have I Been Pwned

troyhunt.com

81–90 of 181 posts

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't understand the procedure. If the database contains hashed passwords (I haven't seen or download the database), how can you know you're using the same salt and method that the one in the datbase? For example, let's say Tumblr was hacked and with it my password `hunter2`. Tumbler used some naive HMAC-MD5 method with a salt, but my site uses argon2 with (obviously) a different salt. Even though my passwor…

One can only implement a HIBP check when one has access to the user's unhashed password. So, at login, registration, and password reset.

Yes, exactly, so that's why I was asking, you mentioned the database was of hashed passwords. The database then contains the source passwords? And you're preventing the user from using one of those passwords?

Sorry, I still don't understand the procedure you mentioned and I'm genuinely curious.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this unlocked a new fear I didn't know I needed to have. I suppose this is the massive drawback to allowing dinosaurs to spearhead policy and govern laws.

For what it's worth, the average tech-smarts in the legal realm and within the FBI are significantly improved compared to 8 years ago. This is just from my personal observation. That said, there are still tremendous gaps yet to be bridged with the understanding of many procecutors and lawyers as well as weird applications of the law that aren't intuitive to people whose life is technology. For example (and I caveat t…

>Did you know the physical medium you get Internet to your house determines what laws and processes the government can use to monitor your Internet traffic?

That I did know, only because I was dumb enough to hitch my wagon to Comcast/Xfinity as a headend tech for years. Just affirmed the idea that all ISPs should be community owned.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#83
post #31
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> haveibeenfucked.com Years ago we had friends, a couple in which the wife was pregnant. They were actually a bit embarrassed that “everyone will know that we ‘did it’”. A level of squeamishishness I could not have imagined!

> They were actually a bit embarrassed that “everyone will know that we ‘did it’”. Most people would be more embarrassed if the wife is clearly pregnant and nobody thinks they “did it”.

I remember reading about something like that in a book, think they were called Mary & Joseph.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this unlocked a new fear I didn't know I needed to have. I suppose this is the massive drawback to allowing dinosaurs to spearhead policy and govern laws.

For what it's worth, the average tech-smarts in the legal realm and within the FBI are significantly improved compared to 8 years ago. This is just from my personal observation. That said, there are still tremendous gaps yet to be bridged with the understanding of many procecutors and lawyers as well as weird applications of the law that aren't intuitive to people whose life is technology. For example (and I caveat t…

> the physical medium you get Internet to your house determines what laws and processes the government can use to monitor your Internet traffic?

I did not! Do you have / know a good explanation of the details?

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#85

he shouldn't have mentioned goatse, or told me not to google it. my curious brain took me to a rabbit hole where several times i wished i didnt have eyes.

what's the learning curve of a GenZer? When boomer says don't look this up on the internet, it's not because they want the information for themselves. It's because they already have something burned into the memories, and are hoping to save you from the same.

It's human nature to be curious and nothing to be ashamed of. And if someone really doesn't want you looking into something, they won't even mention it.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#86

Troy Hunt is such a treasure. And for us web application developers, there is no excuse for not having protection against credential stuffing! While the best defense is likely two-factor [1], checking against Hunt's hashed password database is also very good and requires no extra work for users! I don't have anything to back this up, but my guess is that the vast majority of compromised user accounts comes from crede…

Sorry, I don't understand the procedure. If the database contains hashed passwords (I haven't seen or download the database), how can you know you're using the same salt and method that the one in the datbase? For example, let's say Tumblr was hacked and with it my password `hunter2`. Tumbler used some naive HMAC-MD5 method with a salt, but my site uses argon2 with (obviously) a different salt. Even though my passwor…

The HIBP database only stores hashes of leaked passwords, but the source material is often (always?) plaintext passwords. If the hash of a password is in the HIBP database, the plaintext password is out there somewhere in a database of a malicious actor.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can only implement a HIBP check when one has access to the user's unhashed password. So, at login, registration, and password reset.

Yes, exactly, so that's why I was asking, you mentioned the database was of hashed passwords. The database then contains the source passwords? And you're preventing the user from using one of those passwords? Sorry, I still don't understand the procedure you mentioned and I'm genuinely curious.

Oh, I see the issue. The HIBP database is SHA-1 hashed with no salt. It was created from unhashed passwords. You can't download the unhashed version (you could of course compute it, if you really wanted to; but there's no need).

So, the procedure you need to implement is, on login/registration/pw reset, you SHA-1 hash the user's unhashed password and do a indexed lookup on your copy of HIBP's database. Or if you don't want to maintain that copy, you can use HIBP's API to do something similar.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#88

Troy Hunt is such a treasure. And for us web application developers, there is no excuse for not having protection against credential stuffing! While the best defense is likely two-factor [1], checking against Hunt's hashed password database is also very good and requires no extra work for users! I don't have anything to back this up, but my guess is that the vast majority of compromised user accounts comes from crede…

About a decade back, I was at an event that had an FBI employee presenting. During his presentation, he had mentioned a story of a sys admin who had been arrested for taking a hashed PW database in his company, comparing the hashes against known compromised one's (perhaps from haveibeenpwned?), and forced a password reset for everyone who had reused a password that had separately been compromised and sent an email to…

Besides legal, I think it's important to realize that there is a very emotional response to discovering that your password is not good.

I know a company that started doing quarterly brute-forcing of passwords as a security check and the reaction to finding out that your password is not strong enough is....all sorts of emotions.

If you have a 10-12 character password that may have been strong at one point but now is not and your IT team is informing you, you're reaction is NEVER, oh thank you for helping me out. It's not stupidity, it's human nature to feel attacked.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#89
post #76

I have memories of this site providing me with an excellent experience. Now it's just a cash-grab, asking for $169.50/year just to see 100 breached accounts! I use unique email addresses (breach canaries) on every website to detect when sites leak my data. When I tried to search for my domain results with a previous domain ownership verification, I got hit with this error: "In order to search a domain with any more t…

You’re doing a weird thing (running your own email domain), doing an even weirder thing (using a different address per site), and then doing an even more weirder thing (scanning your personal domain for breaches) and your supposition is that very specific use case is a cash cow for Troy Hunt? Come on.

Re: A decade of Have I Been Pwned

#90
post #89
post #76

I have memories of this site providing me with an excellent experience. Now it's just a cash-grab, asking for $169.50/year just to see 100 breached accounts! I use unique email addresses (breach canaries) on every website to detect when sites leak my data. When I tried to search for my domain results with a previous domain ownership verification, I got hit with this error: "In order to search a domain with any more t…

You’re doing a weird thing (running your own email domain), doing an even weirder thing (using a different address per site), and then doing an even more weirder thing (scanning your personal domain for breaches) and your supposition is that very specific use case is a cash cow for Troy Hunt? Come on.

I do the exact same thing. Every site, service, and contact gets a personal something@mydomain email address to reach me.
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