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How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

peebs.org

21–30 of 42 posts

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#21
post #20
post #11

Dude, just use bcrypt, no need to reinvent the wheel

Dude, read the article (the title is misleading). He is talking about creating a password that he can memorize, not about encrypting his password.

Misleading is an understatement. This is exactly the kind of article you don't want a developer/admin to read when searching for information on password salting.

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#23
post #5

This is just a way to create a slightly more complex password, if it's stored as a fast hash (like md5) then it's still going to be very easy to crack. The problem with this method is that if one of your passwords is leaked and cracked then it wouldn't be too hard to guess how your scheme works. This gets even easier if they have 2 or more of your passwords. It seems to me that a scheme like this would have to be muc…

>This is just a way to create a slightly more complex password, if it's stored as a fast hash (like md5) then it's still going to be very easy to crack. It's not about storage, it is about how to get people to use different passwords. Arguably, the passwords are not very different, but what matters is that they are no longer identic Its still good advice to people who use the same password on all their accounts. 'jus…

'just prefix the password with the first three letters of the hostname' ...

I just changed all my passwords so they're prefixed with 'www' but I'm not sure how that will help make them more secure. (j/k)

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#24
post #22

Why not use a password manager? You only need one password and don't have to do salt tricks. There are even password managers with 2-factor login. Unique strong passwords for each site auto filled. Super easy.

Because most of us want to be able to use any device in the world without relying on any third party to login to a certain website.

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#25
By all means, strengthen your passwords. But a major flaw in this approach and many others is that there is no validation step at the end. These days, users must ask themselves questions like, "Is the hash of this password likely to be in a rainbow table?" or "If an attacker knows two of my passwords, can they determine the rest?" Any sufficiently random and/or complex approach is still capable of generating weak passwords. Unfortunately, the only question users tend to ask themselves is, "Can another human guess my password?" That's not enough and hasn't been for a long, long time.

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#26
This is, in my opinion, the best way (by far) to handle passwords for non-security-critical accounts.

Came across this forum that you last visited 7 years ago? Remember the password? With this technique you will, without resorting to password managers - and still have a unique password on every site.

Remember not to make your salt obvious though. In other words don't just append the domain name in front of the password or it will be quite worthless. Instead take for instance the third letter in your password and let it be the second-to-last letter in the domain name (and do some further transformations), and you're good to go. You will remember the specific password for sites you go to often but for any site you will be able to "re-generate" the password in your head.

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#27
post #24
post #22

Why not use a password manager? You only need one password and don't have to do salt tricks. There are even password managers with 2-factor login. Unique strong passwords for each site auto filled. Super easy.

Because most of us want to be able to use any device in the world without relying on any third party to login to a certain website.

They need an app for that. Not one that helps you login quickly on your own machine or phone, but one that helps you login to your sites on a 3rd party computer.

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#28
post #14

This is not good protection against a targeted effort -- when somebody wants to get your account as opposed to any account, when they have one instance of a "salted" password they might be able to reverse-engineer your salting effort and apply it to another site. And they don't have to completely reverse it, either, it might be enough to significantly reduce the difficulty of brute force. But it sure beats using an i…

...it can still be done completely in your head, as opposed to other schemes ("real" hashing schemes, password managers)

I'm using a free password manager (KeePassX) with the file hosted on Dropbox for a couple of years now. I've not had any major trouble with it.

People might like to note, though, that my 16 character randomly password (lowercase letters and numbers for over 128 bits of entropy) was still cracked during the LinkedIn incident. I'm switching to 24 character passwords now.

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pwdhash is a project out of stanford that wraps all this up into a browser extension. It just hashes your password with the domain you're logging into. https://www.pwdhash.com/ the paper: http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/pwdhash.pdf

wow thats so cool. for a long time now, i've been looking for a solution. i tried keepass, but it doesn't really work well in linux, and i don't have my passwords on other computers. then i tried lastpass, but i don't like the idea of my passwords beeing stored somewhere else (even though they are encrypted). this sounds like a solid solution to the easy-to-remember but different-password-for-each-site problem. defin…

i tried keepass, but it doesn't really work well in linux

The integration might be less than for Windows and OS X. It works great for me on those systems, though.

i don't have my passwords on other computers.

I just keep a KeePass file in Dropbox. I also have a KeePass app on my phone.

Re: How I salt my own passwords and sleep a little better at night

#30
First of all, choosing nursery rhymes or movie titles isn't much better than choosing dictionary words. That strategy has been shown to have low entropy. Multiword passwords are easier to remember, but you need something actually random. If you want a strong multiword password, it's a good idea to have an actual RNG do it for you, so you can use something like http://passphra.se/. If they don't already, hackers will soon have dictionaries that will crack passwords like "ring around the rosy" and "there is no spoon" as easily as "champagne", but they're never going to crack a password like "eager man dirt fly" in better than brute force time.

OK, so with that out of the way, let's say you've chosen a weak (and common) password. If people start using this self-salting scheme, it's a fair bet someone else that will use the same self-salt as you, and that means two identical hashes in the database. That's bad news.

But it's also easy to fix. Simply choose some fixed salt to also add to your password. It could be the first two letters of your username, for example. That way, if "bobmarley" and "jackblack" both have the password "champagne" and both used the first four letters of the website for their salt, then on linked in one will be "linkbochampagne" and the other will be "linkjachampagne", and they can rest knowing that it's very unlikely that their password will hash the same as someone else's.

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