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Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

us.battle.net

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Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#111
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a certain number of attempts even the account is locked out of being logged into for a period. Also after being logged into from multiple IP's in a short period it will be locked. You guys seriously act like Blizzard just fell off the turnip truck here.

Unless the list of accounts you want to crack is tiny, a brute force attack easily gets around per-account rate limiting by simply switching to a different account before tripping it and coming back to the account later.

There's only say 12-15 million active accounts. Even if you had all of them you're going to run out of attempts before you reliably brute force anything. Far more likely is Blizzard looks out for large scale distributed brute force attacks and locks users to their last handful of confirmed IPs.

That's in the realm of speculation admittedly. Look I'm largely defending Blizzard here but they aren't paragons of security. For one thing they could stop a lot of actual real world keyloggers by putting in a randomized screen pin entry. They never did that but they have been pretty aggressive on many other fronts. The fact that their passwords are case insensitive is something that might surprise many people, (and I was mildly shocked when it was pointed out to me years back because I had been dutifully capitalizing 2 characters in my p/w....) but it ends up not being of much consequence imho. Almost all hacks have been keylogger or social. There's one rumored (confirmed?) MITM attack against the authenticator. There's probably some people that used 123456 etc. but the option for a more secure password probably wasn't going to help those people, ymmv.

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#112
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Am I missing something silly? Yes. It's not that the bad guys try bruteforce to login multiple times and wait to be banned. They could (will/might) steal db with hashed passwords, do their decrypting at home and then login with what they got. The stronger the password (or better, ie slower to calculate hash used) the more time they need for that thus giving more time for Blizzard to realize passwords were compromise…

This assumes they aren't salting the hashes. But Blizzard apparently[1] uses SRP 6+ which does salt the hashes meaning if you and me have the same password we will still have unique hashes. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/u2168/blizzard_inten...

That's cool, I had never heard of this.

How is the salt stored to make sure attackers won't just steal your salt anyway? Wikipedia says "the salt is stored along with the output of the one-way function" [1]. Does it means the server needs to store the salt for each user so it can authenticate the password?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#113
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes they aren't salting the hashes. But Blizzard apparently[1] uses SRP 6+ which does salt the hashes meaning if you and me have the same password we will still have unique hashes. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/u2168/blizzard_inten...

That's cool, I had never heard of this. How is the salt stored to make sure attackers won't just steal your salt anyway? Wikipedia says "the salt is stored along with the output of the one-way function" [1]. Does it means the server needs to store the salt for each user so it can authenticate the password? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

Every randomized password hash does exactly this; the randomizing nonce is tiny compared to the hash itself.

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#114
post #90

Not sure about Diablo but one of the reasons I can think of why some web site's password is case in-sensitive (it is not uncommon) - they are checking the user password directly with MySQL, e.g. select * from users where user = 'john' and password = 'PASSWORD'; -- the password is actually case in-sensitive if your table collation is ci (which is the default) Of course this also implies the site is storing the passwor…

That's not what Battle.net does. They use SRP, which dictates a specific strong cryptographic storage.

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#115
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes they aren't salting the hashes. But Blizzard apparently[1] uses SRP 6+ which does salt the hashes meaning if you and me have the same password we will still have unique hashes. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/u2168/blizzard_inten...

That's cool, I had never heard of this. How is the salt stored to make sure attackers won't just steal your salt anyway? Wikipedia says "the salt is stored along with the output of the one-way function" [1]. Does it means the server needs to store the salt for each user so it can authenticate the password? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

As the defender, you don't care if the salt is obtained by the attacker. The salt is not a secret. It's only use is to ensure that each password is hashed as unique, even if the users chose the same password. Basically, it is for defeating precomputed databases (rainbow tables), nothing more.

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#116
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes they aren't salting the hashes. But Blizzard apparently[1] uses SRP 6+ which does salt the hashes meaning if you and me have the same password we will still have unique hashes. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/u2168/blizzard_inten...

That's cool, I had never heard of this. How is the salt stored to make sure attackers won't just steal your salt anyway? Wikipedia says "the salt is stored along with the output of the one-way function" [1]. Does it means the server needs to store the salt for each user so it can authenticate the password? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

You store a salt per user. Salts protect against rainbow table attacks. The salt doesn't have to be private for it to be effective at that task.

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#118
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. It is not a bug. From my experience, technically inept users confuse upper and lower case all the time - and the result is they file an incident report because their "password stopped working". The same applies to leading or trailing spaces, they should be stripped.

No. Usually, when I create a password I'm asked to verify it in the next text field. When I visit the login page and enter the exact same characters , I expect it to work. I shouldn't have to guess at my own password because some clever developer's algorithm decides that I made a mistake.

You don't need to guess it, if it's implemented the correct way, the signup and the login process will have the same rules and you won't notice.

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting demo: [1] By not doing all 3 hashes, an attacker might realise that the password they sent passed, say, 2 checks, but not the third. This discloses information about the relationship between the password the attacker just tried and the correct password. [1] http://carlos.bueno.org/2011/10/timing.html

I'm not sure how this is applicable here, if the attacker passes any of the tests then they are able to log in

Indeed, stupid logic on my part.

Re: Diablo 3 bug report: "Passwords not case-sensitive."

#120

They don't (or didn't, I haven't checked in the last few months) allow special characters, either. Seriously - what? (Then again, my bank does the same thing.)

> They don't (or didn't, I haven't checked in the last few months) allow special characters, either. Seriously - what? (Then again, my bank does the same thing.) This is not entirely correct. They do allow some types of punctuation, and have done for a very long while. I haven't tested characters like #, @, & (etc) though, but periods and the like have worked.

Fun fact: most banks don't enforce case-sensitivity for passwords either
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