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Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

csoonline.com

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Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#31

Post by lostlogin »

smtddr wrote: post #23
nwh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call Photoshop an achievement, it's a hodgepodge of old libraries and bugs at the best of times. Adobe refused to patch a vulnerability in CS5 at one point, telling people to purchase and upgrade to CS6 (US$199) if they wanted to not be vulnerable to malicious code execution. In response to the uproar they eventually backported the patch. [0]: http://www.macworld.com/article/1166779/adobe_will_issue_fre...

If Photoshop, basically industry standard in image-editing software, isn't an achievement... then nothing qualifies as an achievement. And this is coming from someone who prefers GIMP on linux. I would love to produce something even a quarter as popular & usable as Photoshop.

It might be more of a reflection on my colleagues and I, but the phrase "industry standard" is basically used to mean something is crap by us. This is in radiology. UI inconsistency, buggy, crashy (as in 40 minutes to reboot the damn system), incompatibility with other systems etc. When you complain, you're told its industry standard, or similar. And this is just one system I use. There are other standards too. The company formally known as Kodak supplied PACS system which relies on IE6. It is also an industry standard. And it's as bad as things get. In healthcare IT industry standard = rock bottom standards.

Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#33

Post by cperciva »

nitrogen wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #12

the top options being bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2, or SHA-2 Thanks, CSO Magazine!

Why is SHA-2 in the list? [Looks like cperciva beat me to it, 0 minutes ago] Something I've always wondered about SHA and MD5, though: if you feed the output of a hash function into its input enough times, will you eventually reach the original value? Will you have traversed the entire output space of the hash, or will there be multiple closed loops, or perhaps even multiple starting points converging on a single ter…

For x So it is a real issue, but not one which is serious enough to matter in practice. This is, however, why we use PBKDF2 instead of PBKDF1.

Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#35

Post by tedunangst »

kevinpet wrote: post #30
tedunangst wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to hear when exactly people think bcrypt became accepted best practice? And how much of a grace period did people have to switch? Were you incompetently negligent if you didn't use bcrypt by 2003? 2007? 2011? (I ask this as a fairly big fan of bcrypt myself. Somehow I just have the impression that half the peanut gallery comments come from people who literally switched over from md5 hashes yesterday and s…

The issue is not bcrypt vs. some other hash. The issue is hashing vs. reversible encryption. Unix has been using salted hashed passwords since the 70s. "one-way hash function" is a common phrase in the first edition of Applied Cryptography published in 1994. http://books.google.com/books?q=isbn:0471597562

Worth noting that Gawker got shat on precisely for using unix salted passwords, so what you're saying isn't the issue is at least some of the issue.

Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#36

Post by nudetayne »

Anytime I register anywhere, I do the following:

1. Use a new or willing-to-be-spammed email address. 2. Use a new phrase-based password.

I write all of this information down on pieces of paper that I keep at my desk. I have a lot of scribbled up paper at this point.

Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#37

Post by jordanthoms »

To play devil's advocate here, isn't this actually more secure than something like MD5 or SHA1 without stretch factors or multiple invocations, assuming that the key was not also stolen?

My reasoning is, that in order for an attacker to get the passwords out of this dump, they have to break the 3DES encryption. Brute forcing the key is, as I understand it, still very difficult, and without it they can't get any of the passwords. If someone did find the key however, they'd have instant access to all of the passwords no matter how complex.

On the other hand, if the passwords had been protected using an unsuitable hash algorithm, the highly efficient GPU-based crackers would be able to find millions of people's passwords very quickly, using the sophisticated dictionaries and mangling techniques that are around now. Even quite complex passwords can often be found in this way, since the GPU crackers have got so fast they can try billions of combinations - e.g. even things like "!)@(#*$&%^Test123" can be cracked. [1] [2]. Although, extremely long and complex passwords should be safe.

Obviously, I'm not advocating we all switch to 3DES for our password storage, and the huge risk here is that the key was also stolen - but I'm wondering if my reasoning is actually right here, and that people without extremely strong passwords are better off with this leak than if it'd been MD5.

[1] - http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-mi...

[2] - http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-yo...

Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#38

Post by jordanthoms »

ssafejava wrote: post #34

So, if Adobe engineers eventually realized that they needed to upgrade their password security, and they had access to the passwords in their DB (they used 3DES, and they had the key) - why did they not immediately decrypt and hash all passwords?

It sounds like they did do that, and this system was the old database which was no longer in use, but they didn't shut it down.

Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#39

Post by tedunangst »

jordanthoms wrote: post #37

To play devil's advocate here, isn't this actually more secure than something like MD5 or SHA1 without stretch factors or multiple invocations, assuming that the key was not also stolen? My reasoning is, that in order for an attacker to get the passwords out of this dump, they have to break the 3DES encryption. Brute forcing the key is, as I understand it, still very difficult, and without it they can't get any of th…

Roughly, yes. You can't just run through the database and crack every account that used one of the top 1000 passwords (password, secret, sex, ...). But since you can see all the accounts that have the same password, that lets you:

1. identify all the people who used a popular password

2. identify anyone who happened to use the same password as one you already know, such as your own.

1 + 2 = 3. if you mount an online attack against the people from 1), once one account is cracked you instantly know all the others as well, and can probably dodge any security of the three fails and you're in timeout variety.

The security afforded by the 3DES key (assuming it's a secret) should be greater than the security of a password like "adob3" even with a good hashing technique.

Re: Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed

#40

Post by andrewflnr »

discardorama wrote: post #19

Adobe, once again. The gift that keeps on giving. After inflicting Flash on the Internet for 15 years, now this. Has any other company caused as much grief on the Internet as Adobe?

Maybe the one responsible for IE6? But I'm told even that was an advance at the time.
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