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All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

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Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#31

Post by cloudkj »

tsally wrote: post #18
tree5 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that. They're led by probably the strongest Rails team anywhere, and they (DHH + team) wrote books on avoiding what RockYou just did. EDIT: I'm specifically referring to DHH's "Agile Web Development With Rails", Chapter 11, Administration

It happened (storing in plaintext, not losing the actual passwords): http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with... We've covered 37signals poor approach to security before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804257 It's my understanding that they've since reformed. I'd be interested in what books you think they've written that provide credible security advice. Blind "fanboyism" (if I may invent a w…

I'm guessing tree5 is talking about "Agile Web Development With Rails," in which the authors do give examples of creating hashed passwords with a unique salt and running a SHA1 digest. The book also talks about preventing plain text passwords from showing up in log files from form submissions.

From what I understand however, AWDWR is only tangentially related to 37signals.

Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#32

Post by tptacek »

jmillikin wrote: post #29
tptacek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "salt" --- which, so far as I can tell, is a term used almost never in academic crypto research --- defeats one very effective exotic attack: the "rainbow table", where an attacker builds a database of perfect hash :: string correspondances. But too many people forget that before the popular Windows cracking tools were released, passwords were cracked exclusively by tools like JtR, which simply contain highly opt…

"salting" also prevents brute-forcing. Assuming a bare-basics implementation (20-char salt in config file, 20-char salt per user, prepended to the password), the only way an attacker can brute-force passwords in a reasonable timeframe is to compromise the server itself. At that point, it would be just as easy to make the login form mail him passwords. Merely choosing a slower digest doessn't help, because the digest…

If you can't understand the significance of these two results (and this is with the default cost factor for BCrypt), you're just arguing to hear yourself talk.

  t1 = Time.now.to_i
  100.times { BCrypt::Password.create("ugh8&eat") } 
  puts Time.now.to_i - t1
  => 12

  t1 = Time.now.to_i
  100.times { Digest::SHA1.hexdigest("ugh8&eat") } 
  puts Time.now.to_i - t1
  => 0
I could raise the number of iterations to bring SHA1 above the measurement floor, but I don't want to lock my computer up with pointless BCrypt cycles.

Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#34

Post by tsally »

tree5 wrote: post #30
tsally wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened (storing in plaintext, not losing the actual passwords): http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with... We've covered 37signals poor approach to security before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804257 It's my understanding that they've since reformed. I'd be interested in what books you think they've written that provide credible security advice. Blind "fanboyism" (if I may invent a w…

"Agile Web Development With Rails", Chapter 11, Administration

Here's the sample code they give in that chapter:

    def self.encrypted_password(password, salt) 
        string_to_hash = password + "wibble" + salt # 'wibble' makes it harder to guess       
        Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(string_to_hash)
    end
They are using SHA1 with a salt, the exact method that security experts recommend against when storing passwords: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995645. And obviously they didn't even use this insecure method internally.

EDIT: tptacek makes a good point. I haven't quite been fair. 37signals did what most companies never do when confronted with a security issue: they quickly acknowledged the problem, fixed it based on the suggestions of the security researchers, and moved on.

Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#35

Post by tptacek »

tsally wrote: post #18
tree5 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that. They're led by probably the strongest Rails team anywhere, and they (DHH + team) wrote books on avoiding what RockYou just did. EDIT: I'm specifically referring to DHH's "Agile Web Development With Rails", Chapter 11, Administration

It happened (storing in plaintext, not losing the actual passwords): http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with... We've covered 37signals poor approach to security before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804257 It's my understanding that they've since reformed. I'd be interested in what books you think they've written that provide credible security advice. Blind "fanboyism" (if I may invent a w…

There is a difference between storing plaintext passwords and actually losing them, and as much as I hate to give someone a pass on insecure password storage (it is, apparently, all I ever talk about here), you have to be intellectually honest.

And, like I say every time this comes up, FedEx and several banks also store plaintext passwords.

37signals no longer stores easily attacked passwords.

Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#36

Post by tsally »

tptacek wrote: post #35
tsally wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened (storing in plaintext, not losing the actual passwords): http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with... We've covered 37signals poor approach to security before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804257 It's my understanding that they've since reformed. I'd be interested in what books you think they've written that provide credible security advice. Blind "fanboyism" (if I may invent a w…

There is a difference between storing plaintext passwords and actually losing them, and as much as I hate to give someone a pass on insecure password storage (it is, apparently, all I ever talk about here), you have to be intellectually honest. And, like I say every time this comes up, FedEx and several banks also store plaintext passwords. 37signals no longer stores easily attacked passwords.

There is a difference between storing plaintext passwords and actually losing them, and as much as I hate to give someone a pass on insecure password storage (it is, apparently, all I ever talk about here), you have to be intellectually honest.

I was intellectually honest. I explicitly said they didn't actually lose them.

37signals no longer stores easily attacked passwords.

I was under the impression that this was true as well. However I just checked and I got my Backpack password emailed to me in plain text. So at least the Backpack application is still incorrect.

Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#37

Post by [deleted] »

jmillikin wrote: post #29
tptacek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "salt" --- which, so far as I can tell, is a term used almost never in academic crypto research --- defeats one very effective exotic attack: the "rainbow table", where an attacker builds a database of perfect hash :: string correspondances. But too many people forget that before the popular Windows cracking tools were released, passwords were cracked exclusively by tools like JtR, which simply contain highly opt…

"salting" also prevents brute-forcing. Assuming a bare-basics implementation (20-char salt in config file, 20-char salt per user, prepended to the password), the only way an attacker can brute-force passwords in a reasonable timeframe is to compromise the server itself. At that point, it would be just as easy to make the login form mail him passwords. Merely choosing a slower digest doessn't help, because the digest…

[deleted]

Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#38

Post by jmillikin »

tptacek wrote: post #23
jmillikin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with using a salted hash? Assuming a competent implementation, it should be computationally infeasible to brute-force any digests in less than a few billion years using current models of computation. I'm particularly curious about how using (for example) BCrypt will prevent brute-forcing "12345", "password", or any of the other simple strings many people use.

That first paragraph is a funny statement, since every Unix security book ever written explains how to use Crack, a tool written before I even got into high school, to rip through Unix salted passwords. I don't think it even bears arguing. The second point is valid but not particularly meaningful. You could also try "12345" and "password" over the network using the login page as an oracle, given a list of usernames.…

I said "competent"; the UNIX crypt() and Windows LanMan schemes do not count. If you have any information about defeating a properly implemented salt+hash system, I (and every other developer in the world) would be eager to hear it.

For example, I just generated a salt/digest combination for a simple example password. It is digested using SHA-1, and the password is four ASCII digits. Here is the database row -- '|' is a delimiter between the fields.

    algo | user_salt            | digest
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    sha1 | lyhsus1eizh815xz69pv | d418a6088847d6f2e5b0e3d2ecf2e300454a0885
If you (or, anybody) can determine the original password from this database row, I will mail you a check for a thousand dollars.

Re: All 32mil RockYou accounts hacked. Passwords were stored in plaintext.

#39

Post by mattmaroon »

I'm not shocked. As I just wrote on my Posterous, RockYou has consistently shown themselves to be just amazingly stupid. I've had the misfortune of dealing with these morons for over a year now. This is far less bad (since I use Roboform) than the time they CC'ed me in with thousands of people on a Merry Christmas email.
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