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A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

qwertycards.com

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#51

Brilliant! Until you lose your wallet. Much like lastpass and other password management software, you're putting all your eggs in one basket, and having faith it won't fail. Passwords are a shitty idea people. We need a better system.

Any authentication system will (and should) fail if you lose the authenticator.

That's not "shitty", that's the way it's supposed to work. A better system, to be of any value, would fall prey to the same 'weakness'. Even biometrics can change over time.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#52
post #7

This is a substitution cipher and it's not very secure. Consider what we can do if we compromise the Amazon password that's given as an example on the website: sh(/J3HqAfQsu..u.rqf Since the password came from Amazon, we know that the last 6 characters are "Amazon," which tells us that: . = A u = M r = Z q = O f = N Now we can start attacking the codeword, which are the characters between the 8-character "space bar c…

SuperGenPass[1] seems to be a much better alternative to this, since it actually hashes your codeword with the website domain. Though it too has its issues (uses fast hash functions, running it as a bookmarklet is problematic too–better to run it offline).

Still, completely agree with this:

> I agree with the replies that this is an unlikely attack considering how passwords are typically compromised

It's always going to be a trade-off. Ultimately any scheme that gets people to use better passwords, even if flawed, must still be an improvement over the alternative of post-it notes and birthdays... there's no such thing as perfect security, as we keep being told.

[1] www.supergenpass.com

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#53
post #7

This is a substitution cipher and it's not very secure. Consider what we can do if we compromise the Amazon password that's given as an example on the website: sh(/J3HqAfQsu..u.rqf Since the password came from Amazon, we know that the last 6 characters are "Amazon," which tells us that: . = A u = M r = Z q = O f = N Now we can start attacking the codeword, which are the characters between the 8-character "space bar c…

This sort of objection is raised whenever basically any mechanism for remembering strong passwords is presented. Much like many results in computational complexity, worst-case results are not necessarily indicative of real-world utility. To wit, in the scenario you outlined the attacker must a) know beforehand that the target was using this device; b) know beforehand that the inserted middle portion was vulnerable to…

It is better than using the same password everywhere, but not by much.

When password databases are leaked, there have been instances of people / groups who take passwords from those leaked databases and try to log in on other sites (for example, to steal money or data, defraud customers, or to plant back-doors to allow future criminal activity).

Suppose that after this becomes popular, there are leaks of at least two plain text databases from popular websites (not that unlikely, unfortunately). These websites might be relatively low value - someone might get permission to comment as someone else, our change their preferences on the site, or something like that, if they had their password. Suppose some people believed this card was safe, and so put a password generated by this card into two of these low-value sites that don't put too much effort into security (since they don't even bother hashing their passwords with bcrypt / scrypt or the like), and also into a high-value site (bank, domain name registrar, GitHub account that hosts puppet scripts, important e-mail account).

Using the two low-value site password databases, I could easily automatically identify likely candidates for these types of passwords that are common between the two databases - they both start with the same 8 'spacebar' characters. I could have a set of likely endings prior to the substitution cipher for the passwords in each database, and this would allow me to use something like the E/M algorithm to work out a distribution of most likely partial substitution cipher table, common word, and space bar values, which I could then combine with likely 'identifier' plaintexts to prioritise the order in which I send passwords to use against the secure site.

All of this would likely be completely automated - and if a significant number of people are using these cards, for certain types of criminal enterprise there is a good chance that it would be cost effective.

All in all, people using this card are taking a very real security risk that is completely unnecessary when there are other better alternatives (like using a password manager, and generating a completely different secure random password for each site). Encrypting the database with a strong password and an expensive key derivation function also complicates other types of attacks (for example, someone secretly going into your wallet and photographing the card) - obviously, they could try to install a keylogger on your phone or computer with the password database, as well as copy your password database, but that probably takes longer and carries more risk of getting caught than photographing a card.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#54

Sadly this is still a fail - I have found numerous sites whose fatuous restrictions on what are or are not legal entries include banning punctuation, never ending in a letter and more. This seems an amusing and useful idea to making passwords - it's usability seems longer lived than my previous (personal) attempts (md5 hashing passwords and domain names). In the end I need a trustable approach to storing encrypted da…

I use "FileBox" for some things, but I'm taking the developer's word that it is secure.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait really? It feels like almost every time I make a new account somewhere and drop in the 200 character high-entropy password that LastPass generated, I get a silent failure or misleading error message about "your username was not recognized." Then I try guessing which feature of my candidate password is pissing off the site: Is it the whitespaces? Special characters? Length? This is particularly maddening because…

You use 200 character passwords? I'm happy with 12.

Obviously the longer the maximum available length the better but it does assume the host computer always has the password manager installed. I'd shudder to think how such a long password would be entered otherwise.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#57
post #51

Brilliant! Until you lose your wallet. Much like lastpass and other password management software, you're putting all your eggs in one basket, and having faith it won't fail. Passwords are a shitty idea people. We need a better system.

Any authentication system will (and should) fail if you lose the authenticator. That's not "shitty", that's the way it's supposed to work. A better system, to be of any value, would fall prey to the same 'weakness'. Even biometrics can change over time.

Math/Crypto allows for distributed authentication. Think bitcoin block chain, miners verify each transaction and but it doesn't rely on any single miner.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#58
post #7

This is a substitution cipher and it's not very secure. Consider what we can do if we compromise the Amazon password that's given as an example on the website: sh(/J3HqAfQsu..u.rqf Since the password came from Amazon, we know that the last 6 characters are "Amazon," which tells us that: . = A u = M r = Z q = O f = N Now we can start attacking the codeword, which are the characters between the 8-character "space bar c…

There is no need to even break the codeword as it is the same for every site. In the above example say we want to guess their gmail password, it is probably: sh(/J3HqAfQsu.?u.?? We have only three characters to guess! OTOH this is only relevant for targeted attacks where the attacker has one password. This still protects you pretty well from bulk attacks (so long as the card is not widely used) and is miles better th…

The site is only an example. You would actually order your own unique card to carry with you. No one would be able to guess your password since your spacebar code is unique to your card.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use 200 character passwords? I'm happy with 12.

Obviously the longer the maximum available length the better but it does assume the host computer always has the password manager installed. I'd shudder to think how such a long password would be entered otherwise.

Once you get up to a threshold like 128 bits there's no real benefit in going further. So 22 alphanumeric characters is 'good enough for anyone'.

Re: A plastic card for easy to remember strong passwords

#60
post #51

Brilliant! Until you lose your wallet. Much like lastpass and other password management software, you're putting all your eggs in one basket, and having faith it won't fail. Passwords are a shitty idea people. We need a better system.

Any authentication system will (and should) fail if you lose the authenticator. That's not "shitty", that's the way it's supposed to work. A better system, to be of any value, would fall prey to the same 'weakness'. Even biometrics can change over time.

It's not two factor, so no it's not 'supposed' to fail if you lose it.
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