This is getting ridiculous. When are we going to see legislation enacted to take these people to task? Surely there is a case to be made that their negligence causes (or has the potential to cause) real harm to their users. We need a Saul Goodman to put together a class action.
Yes, the government would surely do a great job legislating development standards. Just look how terrifically they've handled software patents.
Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
81–90 of 168 posts
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first step in the SRP protocol is to retrieve the cryptographic salt from the server, so you're essentially free to roam. This step has concerns of its own though... for one thing the request itself reveals that the username/id is valid, and if you cache the userid / salt pair on the client machine it's vulnerable to snooping by other people with physical access. There are some fairly straightforward tweaks that…
> This step has concerns of its own though... for one thing the request itself reveals that the username/id is valid Does it have to? Can you not have an implementation that always responds with a fake salt if the username is not valid?
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, trusting remote services (and the communication infrastructure in between) is naïve. Meanwhile, I use KeePass and generate a different key for each service.
I also use Keepass....but why the smeg do I need to do this? My browser should be deriving per-site passwords for me at a minimum
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome idea, should randomly salt them for users who insist on using the same password for different sites.
"i created my account on machine x, now i can't log in from machine y".
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The answer" doesn't exist and it never will. Everyone has to do their part. Services that store passwords in plaintext should definitely be publicly shamed, every single time.
A browser plugin that pre-hashes anything in a hidden text field (with a user secret key and the password origination domain) could mimic this as a layer on top of existing technology. It would have the obvious portability issues, and I'm sure other implementation issues.
I've been running it for years, which feels quite nice when sites start leaking passwords left and right.
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#86Before the bcryot/scrypt advocacy and general shaming starts... I'll just make the same comment I always do when this happens: the answer is not more sever side hashing. Trusting remote services with plaintext passwords is broken to begin with. We shouldn't give them the chance to mess this up. We need client side hashing and key-stretching that only something like SRP can provide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secur…
What's the point of the key stretching on the client side, if your stretched key gets sent to the server and is stored in plaintext. It adds no security. Server-side salting and hashing is the answer.
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#87maybe i am just stupid, but how are password managers secure? i've seen people using them, and if i were of a less honourable persuasion i could abuse that quite easily... on the other hand, its impossible for me to steal information from out of their brain (so far at least).
I use passpack to store different random passwords on all my online services, EXCEPT for my email account. That one is stored only in my brain.
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome idea, should randomly salt them for users who insist on using the same password for different sites.
"i created my account on machine x, now i can't log in from machine y".
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's a false dichotomy. Are you saying we should dismiss dangerous flaws in the trust model, just because we have some workarounds for bad industry practice, and can 'make do'? because I'm not saying we shouldn't advocate strengthening existing databases right now. To me, the two concerns are completely separate.
The is/ought fallacy isn't about saying that the actual world and the ideal world are mutually exclusive; that you can't get to the ideal world from the actual world. It's that dismissing actual options because they are not as good as hypothetical options is fallacious reasoning. It's about taking the actual world seriously, on its own terms, without getting tied up in knots about the parameters of the ideal world. R…
> Regardless of whether any one of us individually argues for such a world, the current world is where our professional duties must be discharged.
And there are plenty of people pushing for bcrypt/scrypt and such every time this happens. My duty in this case is to point out that this will never end all the time we allow the possibility of recurrence.
There's a real danger in going too far and making bcrypt/scrypt solutions doctrine. There are still plenty of people out there who continue to tout hashing with SHA-1 and salts of a certain construct, because at some point they understood why it was important, continue to have the security conscience, but are not up to date with the new realities.
This is why solutions at the architectural level, and not in the application or framework are so so important. Why oh why oh why, don't we have a column type in SQL databases specifically for storing passwords?
Re: Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords
#90This is why it is often silly when articles condemn users for weak passwords when a password list is stolen. The proper assumption is that any password I use is stored and transmitted in plain text and just now falling into the hands of bad people.
This is the reason that until I started expressing this idea on HN, that my HN password was "hackernews". If HN was breached, I was no less secure. Sans the pursuit of lolz, it wasn't even worth trying to guess.
Of course, I changed it to something harder to prevent mischief since some individuals might have seen my comments as a challenge.