I finally made the switch to randomly-generated passwords for everything, so for once I can finally not care at all that this happened. It's just a reminder that I need to close my Evernote account.
Evernote hacked
181–190 of 220 posts
Re: Evernote hacked
#182I'm kind of annoyed they didn't send an email, just flagged my password. So I couldn't use the iphone/mac apps and had to login via the web interface to reset. Which I didn't know because they didn't send an email, just got an invalid password error. Their lack of encryption and lack of 2 factor auth just became a much bigger issue for me...
What lack of encryption?
Oh, sorry. I was under the impression that Evenote stored my files in plain text. Do you have information on what encrypted storage format the are using?
Re: Evernote hacked
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The definition of a symmetric cipher requires the cipher text to be (practically) indistinguishable from random. Length is not particularly useful (multiple blocks, different block ciphers with equal block length).
Lots of developers who read "Learn PHP in 24 Hours" and similar texts use md5 (32 chars) or sha1 (40 chars). If you're an attacker and see a hex string that's 40 chars long, that gives you a great place to start since you know it's likely to be a naïve SHA1 hash.
Re: Evernote hacked
#184Frustrating, I thought they would have done security better than most given the type of information stored here. Does anyone know a decent password keeper? I have a list of logins/passwords for my key sites in a word .doc file stored locally, but given I have a work mac, home mac, tablet and iPhone it really is a pain to access the locally stored file. I thought about saving this file on google drive, but their 2-fac…
LastPass offers everything that you're mentioning, plus 2-factor auth that integrates with the Google Authenticator app if you want. It's free if you use it on desktop with browser extensions, but costs $1/month for mobile. I would highly recommend checking it out.
www.lastpass.com
Re: Evernote hacked
#185The 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 ?
Of course, every password should have a large individual salt to prevent rainbow tables.
A hidden salt that is used across all passwords is useless on a public service, because that becomes the password to hack.
The attacker takes an account that has a known password and brute forces the salt from that.
Salt and hash are good for protecting well chosen passwords, but because the speed they can be processed mean the hacker can try billions of different passwords a second. These days choosing a cryptographically hard (memory hard) is the best bet to extend the time from a breach to password discovery so the majority of the users can change their password.
Re: Evernote hacked
#186Earlier 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…
With publicly creatable accounts by the potential hacker, a pepper is just another password.
Leaving identifiable bits in the hash makes it easier to do things like
if pass_type ($1$) { on_logon $upgrade_to_pass_type$6$)
> At worse, you slow them down a bit, allowing you to do things like mass-email everybody affected.
If you ever know at all.
Better to use 'not fast' hashes like bcrypt, scrypt, or PB(something) that requires far more work and far slower cracking.
Re: Evernote hacked
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your blog post says: > "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 dem…
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…
I agree with you, but that's not how Randall got the entropy for the comic. His entropy numbers come from NIST SP 800-63[0], for "correct horse battery staple" spaces included.
But NIST SP 800-63 has been shown to be invalid in metric for entropy, making the comic's numbers incorrect in real application.[1]
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#NIST_Special_... [1]: http://reusablesec.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-paper-on-passwor...
Re: Evernote hacked
#188Earlier 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…
Thanks for igniting this discussion, Niten. While digging around, I stumbled onto this tool which others might find helpful: https://github.com/lowe/zxcvbn zxcvbn, named after a crappy password, is a JavaScript password strength estimation library. Use it to implement a custom strength bar on a signup form near you! zxcvbn attempts to give sound password advice through pattern matching and conservative entropy calcul…
zxcvbn is great. We actually use it for people registering on https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
Re: Evernote hacked
#189Earlier 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…
Thanks for igniting this discussion, Niten. While digging around, I stumbled onto this tool which others might find helpful: https://github.com/lowe/zxcvbn zxcvbn, named after a crappy password, is a JavaScript password strength estimation library. Use it to implement a custom strength bar on a signup form near you! zxcvbn attempts to give sound password advice through pattern matching and conservative entropy calcul…
I also ported zxcvbn to python for those of you looking to integrate it into things that don't have javascript support (a native app or something--that was the original motivation for it).
https://github.com/rpearl/python-zxcvbn/
I am a bit slow at pulling patches (sorry, I just get super busy) but I do get to it eventually.
Re: Evernote hacked
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, who doesn't do 2fa for something like this in 2013? Or 2012, or even 2011?
Rackspace doesn't support 2fa in 2013. Or multiple users on an account, for that matter... (much to my shock and dismay)
It's kind of funny that a lot of services which have decent general security have lax internal/admin user or account-management.
The weakest link at every hosting provider seems to be the customer admin panel/provisioning interface. This is one thing AWS does relatively well vs. other providers (now); IAM is pretty featureful, but few people actually use it to even 5% of what it can do.