Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
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Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#2Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods." We do know why people use SHA1(unsalted password), and it's because the dev stack still doesn't support something like SHA-256 or better yet bcrypt/PBKDF2 at all levels.
So, right, I was a web developer pushing my PHP-based company to have a more robust-against-db-compromise password hashing strategy. You know what the huge problem was? The huge problem was, MySQL (and hence phpMyAdmin) didn't have a SHA2() function until mid-2010. Not only is SHA2() 'not enough', i.e. it's too fast and you want to do key stretching -- but even then, they didn't even have that.
So suppose you are developing an agile product, someone loses access to their account and asks for a new password, you type `head -c 9 /dev/urandom | base64` into your shell and get back `pYG3fvp9c06m`. If you don't have anything better built yet, you're going to go into the database and write the one-off query `UPDATE users SET pw_hash=SHA1('pYG3fvp9c06m') WHERE username = 'bob.bobertson'`, or, at best, `SET salt='tyDvBBHioUNS', pw_hash=SHA1('tyDvBBHioUNSpYG3fvp9c06m')`.
If you could get an interoperable PBKDF2 working in MySQL/Postgres, PHP, et cetera, devs would use that. It's precisely because it's not easy that it's not adopted.
EDIT: My apologies to Poul-Henning Kamp for implying that he was a journalist. I thought that would be a sort of compliment but I can see now that it's more of a sort of category error. (But I still think that the problem is precisely that the whole dev stack doesn't support any standard.)
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#3Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods." We do know why people use SHA1(unsalted password), and it's because the dev stack still doesn't support something like SHA-256 or better yet bcrypt/PBKDF2 at all levels. So, right, I was a web developer pushing my PHP-based company to have a more rob…
Poul-Henning Kamp is many things, but journalist?
He is allowed to say stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods."
And this is Linkedin. They should know and do better.
I actually imagine that their very gifted developers are running around wondering how they themselves didn't audit this.
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#4Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods." We do know why people use SHA1(unsalted password), and it's because the dev stack still doesn't support something like SHA-256 or better yet bcrypt/PBKDF2 at all levels. So, right, I was a web developer pushing my PHP-based company to have a more rob…
Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods."
Poul-Henning Kamp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Kamp) is not a "tech journalist."
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#5Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods." We do know why people use SHA1(unsalted password), and it's because the dev stack still doesn't support something like SHA-256 or better yet bcrypt/PBKDF2 at all levels. So, right, I was a web developer pushing my PHP-based company to have a more rob…
I just googled "PBKDF2 PHP" and the first page was full of free implementations. But maybe it's cheating, since I know what "PBKDF2" is. I tried to simulate what a totally ignorant person would do, and googled "PHP password." The second result was the PHP manual page on passwords, where it explains in eleven different languages, using simple words, exactly what the deal is with password hashing, and refers people to two built-in functions (crypt() and hash()) that handle both bcrypt and PBKDF2.
Exactly how much easier does it need to get? Shall we print out the manual page and put it under people's doorsteps?
It would take like a maximum of twenty minutes for anyone at all, armed with Google and Stack Overflow, to go from "I know nothing at all about password hashing" to "I am securely hashing my passwords" in PHP or any other language. I think it's fair to wonder what the fuck is wrong when, in companies full of tens or hundreds of presumed-competent programmers, nobody does that, ever.
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#6No one should be surprised that the dipshits at LinkedIn fell victim. Nor should they extend any sympathy, after LinkedIn was caught stealing mobile app users' calendar appointments and notes.
I'm not going to rehash what has already been summed up: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/forcing-people-to-use...
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#7Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods." We do know why people use SHA1(unsalted password), and it's because the dev stack still doesn't support something like SHA-256 or better yet bcrypt/PBKDF2 at all levels. So, right, I was a web developer pushing my PHP-based company to have a more rob…
I can see why people don't use bcrypt/PBKDF2: they don't know or it's not a priority. Your reason, however, doesn't strike me as a particularly good one: you could just write a quick password reset tool in PHP or even better write a quick shell script that splits out the password reset query.
And I think LinkedIn really has no excuse.
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#8Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods." We do know why people use SHA1(unsalted password), and it's because the dev stack still doesn't support something like SHA-256 or better yet bcrypt/PBKDF2 at all levels. So, right, I was a web developer pushing my PHP-based company to have a more rob…
> So suppose you are developing an agile product, someone loses access to their account and asks for a new password, you type `head -c 9 /dev/urandom | base64`....`UPDATE users`
I don't think I ever want to be _that_ agile. My agile projects usually have a set of application functions exposed as scripts immediately. And yes, proper password change is one of them. (besides, how about just using `pwgen 16` and not some trickery with head and random?)
Second goal: establish a process that gets everyone flagged that tries to change things using phpMyAdmin that have proper equivalents in your scripting toolkit. Agility is no excuse for sloppiness. If the agile crowd still insists to be agile to death, call the whole thing MVT (Minimum viable toolkit).
Using a framework where all this can be done from a REPL also helps a lot.
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#9Would it be possible to come up with a simple little icon that can be put on sign-up pages to indicate that the service is using PBKDF2 or bcrypt of the like?
Then, it would need to become popular enough for users to start to recognise it and look out for it when signing up. Even if most users don't have any idea what it's about, plenty of the more technically inclined users would, and they tend to be the early adopters anyway...
The idea is to add a bit of pressure to services to store passwords correctly (similar to how users look for the green SSL bar when doing important stuff online), and providing some transparency to the users who care about this.
Re: Poul-Henning Kamp: LinkedIn Password Leak? Salt Their Hide
#10Would it be possible to come up with a simple little icon that can be put on sign-up pages to indicate that the service is using PBKDF2 or bcrypt of the like? Then, it would need to become popular enough for users to start to recognise it and look out for it when signing up. Even if most users don't have any idea what it's about, plenty of the more technically inclined users would, and they tend to be the early adopt…
This is a bad idea, and here's why:
Honestly, I see it as almost self-evident that user would never ever learn this.
But more importantly, what would stop anyone from putting up these icons? Who would check that they actually implemented it?
Even if that was solved, people would just implement this one thing because it looked good. But there are plenty of other ways to ruin your password security, so you couldn't really trust them more than you could in the first place. (IMHO, this is a core issue with security standardization)