101–110 of 220 posts
Over the past few years I've told everyone to refrain from using Evernote. I told them that Evernote doesn't use end-to-end encryption and that eventually this would happen.
Hardly anyone would listen ("You're just paranoid", "I don't store anything private in there anyway, except.. oh").
For once I take cruel pleasure in being "that guy". The general public needs to learn this lesson.
The following blog post is also being sent to all Evernote users as an email communication. Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service. As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and inst…
> Please create a new password by signing into your account on evernote.com( https://www.evernote.com/Login.action ). and > Never click on ‘reset password’ requests in emails Is sure to confuse a lot of people.
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Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption. (In technical terms, they are hashed and salted.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography) )) That's great. But to really reassure people they would do best to reveal the algorithm. After all, DES-based password hashes are both 'hashed and salted' but are easily broken with JtR.
It doesn't really matter what they used, as hashing speeds improve so quickly. You have to assume that the password you were using on evernote will be cracked, so to be safe you have to change it everywhere you were using it. Given that most people reuse passwords i expect a lot of follow-on exploiting of other systems with the passwords retrieved from evernote.
Assume a central account/profile service. This service would allow you to have a single login to this service, with a directory of pretty much any/all sites and services online.
The external services would receive a hashed token of your account/authorization. They would check for the validity of the token each [interval|day|time-the-service-was-accessed] to determine if the token/auth is still valid.
They would also be able to tell the central service whether or not they require an updated token/auth, for circumstances just like this.
Further, form data could be stored on the central service, like mailing, shipping, billing, etc info. A log of all sites/accounts that request/require/use this information is kept.
Access to this and all other profile information can be reviewed/revoked by the user at any time.
Groups and layers of account information would be something that could alternately be added to the central service. I.E. - you could have a first level login to get to your dashboard, but additional security could be required to change various portions of your profile details (one passwd for address info, another for accounts)....
Avatar galleries would be available and you could tell each service which avatar to associate with what.
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Curious, if the attacker knows what the encryption algorithm is, does it help them at all in breaking it? I.e., does it potentially delay breaking it by not revealing it?
In theory, yes, in practice it is fairly obvious how something is hashed just by eye. Different hash algorithms produce different output (lengths, starting character, and spread). So with some experience you can often tell (or guess and test) what something is hashed with.
That said, revealing the exact algorithm would basically be throwing people with weak passwords to the wolves while really only supplying the rest of us with a false sense of security (because it will probably be cracked anyway).
We'd also be better off if they didn't announce the algorithm if the passwords get leaked (like with LinkedIn).
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Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption. (In technical terms, they are hashed and salted.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography) )) That's great. But to really reassure people they would do best to reveal the algorithm. After all, DES-based password hashes are both 'hashed and salted' but are easily broken with JtR.
It doesn't really matter what they used, as hashing speeds improve so quickly. You have to assume that the password you were using on evernote will be cracked, so to be safe you have to change it everywhere you were using it. Given that most people reuse passwords i expect a lot of follow-on exploiting of other systems with the passwords retrieved from evernote.
There are hashing algorithms (bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2) that are specifically designed to be slow to prevent these attacks.
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The "tradeoff" seems to be "make the server into a dumb store for encrypted data." At which point, you don't have Evernote (an API for fuzzy-matching clippings punted into it from various devices), you have Evernote (a set of fat client programs) plus a POSS (Plain Old Storage Service, like S3.) In fact, the workflow sounds like it would have more in common with editing a Word document over SMB than with making web r…
I don't think you got quite what I'm trying to say--the whole point of Evernote is that all your data is "there", and the collated index for finding this or that is "there", and so any individual piece of data doesn't need to be on this device or that device. When you insert a new piece of data, all you need is that piece of data. You send it off to Evernote, and they stick it into your database. Then, later--still w…
If your imaginary attacker can social engineer your local encryption password out of you, he can just as well engineer your Evernote password out of you. There is no difference.
The real issue is that today someone who hacks the Evernote servers will gain access to all users notes. With end-to-end encryption they'd have to target each user individually.
1) I'm sick of going through this password reset crap every month or so. Please lets get rid of passwords.
2) Could Evernote please look at some sort of oauth based signin for mobile devices? I have to enter this unique and very long password multiple times on every device I own.
It'd be nice if my linked phone and tablet didn't need me to use the same login system as a human.
we have found no evidence == "we really don't know" Sorry, I'm sure the Evernote tech team is competent, but clearly some marketing spin has been put on this announcement.
What exactly leads you to this assumption?
They designed a service that stores sensitive user-data in an obviously insecure fashion (no end-to-end encryption).
If that's not incompetence then the only other explanation would be criminal negligence?
The following blog post is also being sent to all Evernote users as an email communication. Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service. As a precaution to protect your data, we have decided to implement a password reset. Please read below for details and inst…
> "Avoid using simple passwords based on dictionary words"
And yet your password algorithm rejects highly secure pass phrases:
> "New passwords can contain letters, numbers and punctuation."
Disallowing spaces is particularly annoying for a company with a strong security requirement, as passphrases are simultaneously far more secure and far more memorable than the monkey rules your validation demand.
It gets worse.
If I type a long sentence without spaces such as "thisphraseisdefinitelynotinthedictionary", you give me an orange warning checkmark and suggest:
> "Try using a combination of letters and numbers"
If I replace that long phrase with "abcde1", just 5 lowercase letters and a digit, you give me a green checkmark! Same green checkmark for "abc123", the third most popular password online.
Have whoever wrote your validator needs to go read http://xkcd.com/936/ and really internalize the idea.
EDIT: See also:
1. How people choose passwords: http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/07/science-of-password-selectio...
2. Top 25 passwords: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/10/prweb10046001.htm
3. Twitter banned passwords: http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/none/284196-the-twitter-banne...
I've never really understood the security model for Evernote. It's "an exocortex" -- your personal notes, which are likely to be more security sensitive than general documents, email, etc. And yet they have even less security than Dropbox, themselves not exactly an exemplar of robust security. They've got competent people operating the service; it's just not well designed for security.
Yeah, Evernote really should have been zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted. Recently https://crypton.io/ was released and my hope is that lots of new SaaS offerings will use it and that this will in the end force even the big names (Dropbox, 37signals, etc) to adopt real security.