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Evernote hacked

blog.evernote.com

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Re: Evernote hacked

#151

Post by CamperBob2 »

bradleybuda wrote: post #138
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #11

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…

> "Never use the same password on multiple sites or services" As long as we're stuck with passwords, this is the single best practice for protecting your accounts. Services WILL be compromised, again and again, and attackers have made a pattern of compromising a poorly-secured service as a side channel to get credentials for a more critical service. Props to Evernote - it seems like they've done the right thing with…

As long as we're stuck with passwords, this is the single best practice for protecting your accounts.

This would be easier if non-critical password cookies didn't expire. Why does my Slashdot or HN password cookie need to expire? Answer: it doesn't, but the fact that it does means that I have to write down dozens of different passwords... and carry them with me if I expect to use those services on a mobile basis.

Life would be a lot easier if password cookies didn't expire (or even if - gasp! - the user was given a choice in the matter). Whenever I'd find myself locked out due to the use of a different browser or platform, I'd request an email reset and keep track of the resulting new password only long enough to update all of my browsers.

If I try to use this strategy now -- and I have -- I'll spend an hour every other day doing nothing but resetting password cookies that didn't need to expire in the first place.

Christ, passwords are stupid. Somebody fix this shit.

/rant

Re: Evernote hacked

#153

Post by SonicSoul »

SonicSoul wrote: post #80

i didn't get the email, and my original password still works, it just took me directly to change password screen. i guess they're counting on compromised passwords not being used individually to create new ones?

according to bbc "It said user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords were accessed"

so i guess since passwords were encrypted they weren't fully compromised and a simple change should be enough.. at least that's what Evernote appears to think.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21644317

Re: Evernote hacked

#154

Post by sigkill »

admford wrote: post #96
josephscott wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it would be nice to know they are using something reasonable, like bcrypt. Their description would satisfied by a simple MD5 + salt, which wouldn't be very good for password storage.

From the Evernote support pages: What type of encryption does Evernote Use? If you encrypt text within a note, we derive a 64-bit RC2 key from your passphrase and use this to encrypt the text. This is the longest symmetric key length permitted by US Export restrictions without going through a complex process to gain export approval. We do not receive any copy of the key or your passphrase, or any escrow mechanism to…

Can anyone tell me why they're using RC2 and not AES? Does the export restriction even disallow that? Seems a bit disingenuous if that is the case.

Re: Evernote hacked

#155

Post by aadamov »

cschneid wrote: post #123
raverbashing wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No The security of your system can never depend on an attacker not knowing the implementation. Or: Security through obscurity (is no security) Using gimmicks like for example shuffling some characters in the hash may delay some attacks. But the problem is that these techniques are usually done on systems that have no sufficient security. Have a big salt and use PBKDF2 or Bcrypt and you know the exact difficulty of ge…

IMO, you should be doing both. People should use strong bcrypted passwords, with a salt, then ALSO a 'secret' pepper value (long value stored in app code). This adds additional security in the case of a db-only dump being released, and doesn't harm the strength or a full code+db release at all either. Stripping off identifying info from hashes like talked about in this thread doesn't weaken the hash in any way, but i…

Indeed, the assumption is that attacker has limited window of opportunity to grab the data. Taking that as a base assumption, it would make sense two store parts of the hashed password in two separate databases on two separate machines. Hacker would have to gain access to both. My initial alternative was to add some trick inside of the code, like a simple shuffling of characters. Assuming that code is not stored on the same machine as DB that should increase security considerably. But either concept would work. Of course it does not remove the need for higher degree of difficulty for hashing itself.

Re: Evernote hacked

#156

Post by miles »

Niten wrote: post #148
miles wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. In a thread about "900gage!@#" being cracked in a few hours[1], this same discussion came up. It's worth reading for those who are wondering about passphrases vs. complex passwords. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4545893

This is, again, not about a random password, as moxie explains in that thread. And as he continues, with regard to the comic: "I think that's totally on the right track, but if people start to do that, chances are that they'll start to create exploitable patterns again". Any password cracker smart enough to exploit the patterns in "900gage!@#" is also smart enough to exploit the construction of an English language pa…

Thanks for your reply, Niten! Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that "900gage!@#" was random, but many people would (wrongly) consider it complex. Users who are not generating and storing random passwords (with KeePass or the like) may make safer password decisions when thinking in terms of a phrase rather than a "complex" word. Of course, they'd be far safer still by using a good password manager and long, truly random passwords.

Re: Evernote hacked

#157

Post by bryanh »

landhar wrote: post #143
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #11

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…

> 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. Were the attackers ables to access the salt ?

Most implementations store the salt with the hash itself. Take Django's storage of "password" for example:

    pbkdf2_sha256$10000$rdfyoPhMNhnC$3QEJ9hp0Qe68/p8+b1tVsYmNqVHiFrhmpWizXq+xQoo=
Which of course stores it as:

    algo $ iterations $ salt $ hash
Salts simply protect against rainbow tables and force CPU cycles to be re-spent on each password individually.

But to answer your question: I'm not sure, but probably.

Re: Evernote hacked

#158

Post by [deleted] »

apawloski wrote: post #134
pyre wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passphrases are more secure than random passwords when you factor in the human element. A 64 character passphrase is more memorable than a 64 random character string and less likely to be written on a post-it note.

Be careful -- you're starting to argue a slightly different point than what your parent made. You're not wrong, but you also haven't done anything to dismiss his claim. He's talking about a 7 character password vs a 4-word passphrase. Not equal sized, 64 character passwords.

[deleted]

Re: Evernote hacked

#159

Post by rasur »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #11

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…

And if you specifically mouse over the links contained in the email received, the domain looks like it could even be a phishing scam:

e.g.:http://links.evernote.mkt5371.com/ctt?other_params_removed

I just went straight to the site instead of following the email links in order to confirm the legitimacy of this mail.

Re: Evernote hacked

#160

Post by vikstrous4 »

Terretta wrote: post #145
Niten wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone using this comic to imply that a passphrase is more secure than a short random password hasn't done the math. This is comparing a passphrase drawn from four of the 2048 most common words against not a random password, but one based on a mutated version of one of the 65536 most common words. The example passphrase does have the equivalent of 44 bits of entropy: log_2 (2048^4) = 4 * 11 = 44 However, if we take a…

> to imply that a passphrase is more secure than a short random password I noted to internalize the idea , the entropy idea versus human "random" passwords which aren't random at all. "Normals" are using their name with a 3 instead of an E, or some word with a 1 on the end. This tends to put them in rainbow tables or easy attacks. See my link #1 in GP comment for reference. That's why I said "pass-phrases are stronge…

When cracking passwords attackers don't just use brute force. The most effective attacks are ones that exploit human patterns such as leet replacements, capital first letter, punctuation at the end, etc. Concatenated words in all lowercase with no spaces is another pattern that can easily be added to their list and probably already is there, so yes, you can assume that that they will be looking at the space of 2048^4 such passwords.
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