111–120 of 369 posts
How do I submit a pull request on Github asking that "hunter2" be removed from his list?
For those who missed the hunter2 reference: http://bash.org/?244321
An old password (12 char numbers and letters) I've since stopped using (but used to use everywhere) appears as pwned in this list (3 times!). I'd love to know who exposed it. Any chance I can find out?
[Pasting an old comment of mine on password managers, since I see people talking about starting to use Keepass. I hope this helps someone] ---- If you're just starting, here's some guidance on setting up a password manager. First of all: Don't be afraid of using one. It's not just more secure, it's super convenient. Never again will you ask yourself: Did I make an account for this website/service? What email did I us…
> you get the added benefit of being able to store 2FA settings Don't do this. If you use a password manager with all the benefits this entails (long, random passwords, each only used for a single site), the only benefit 2FA really gives you is if your password manager is compromised somehow. If your second factor is in your password manager, you're screwed. I use Authy with a long, secure password printed on a piece…
I don't think this is true. Your long, random password can still be compromised, for example if ever type it on an insecure device (a friend's computer? public or shared computer? etc). 2FA keeps that single compromised password from being useful.
It is undeniably true that storing 2FA secrets in the same vault as your passwords reduces security. However, it's still way, way better than not using 2FA at all.
I just tried a 11 character password without special chars, that I’ve used on over 50 sites, over the last decade. It’s my password for throaway websites. Some pretty dodgy. Not in the database. Makes me feel pretty good about password security overall!
Hmm this is a pretty great list to use for any service that has user signups -- disallow signup when using a password that is known to have been "pwned"! :)
do not skip the section on "Cloudflare, Privacy and k-Anonymity" ... it is a great summary of an elegant privacy solution. And check out Cloudflare's detail post too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with...
Why does 0000 have the largest number of hashes? Does SHA-1 not distribute hash values evenly?
Note that in the description below, I refer to any keyed involution as a block cipher. One may make a semantic distinction, but any keyed involution could be used as a block cipher (though, of course, most involutions would contain trivial cryptographic weaknesses).
SHA-1 is based around a 160-bit unbalanced Feistel block cipher. The input in broken into blocks, where the final block contains padding and a final count of the amount of data processed. A copy of the 160-bit state is made, the 160 bit state is encrypted using a block of the input as a key, and the initial copy is added back (without carries between 32-bit words) to the original copy. This is repeated for each input block in turn. This is called a Davie-Meyer construction for making a hash function out of a block cipher.
For any Davies-Meyer hash function, the block cipher is invertible and therefore unbiased. The addition is invertible and unbiased. Any bias would therefore have to come from non-zero correlation between addition and encryption. For any moderately complex block cipher, these correlations would be very complex. Real world design of Davies-Meyer hash functions focuses on absolutely minimizing any patterns present, and cryptanalysis focuses on characterizing and approximating any and all minute patterns that escape the design process.
There are some patterns (weaknesses) in SHA-1, but all known weaknesses are way more complex (and minuscule) than could explain the sort of bias seen in this data set, so the bias must be coming from a higher-level source than SHA-1 itself.
On a side note, the addition in Davies-Meyer is to intentionally make the round function non-invertible. If the round function were invertible, there's a trivial birthday attack on the intermediate state between rounds that square roots the strength of the hash function. MD4, MD5, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 are all Davies-Meyer constructions using unbalanced Feistel ciphers. RIPEMD-160 is a parallel application of two Davie-Meyers hashes with different initial values, followed by XORing the two outputs to obtain the final output. SHA-3 is the most notable cryptographic hash function that's not a Davie-Meyer construction.
In case you're wondering, one could make a Davies-Meyer hash function using AES. The designers of AES took AES, doubled the word size, doubled the number of words, and fixed a deficiency discovered in the nonlinear byte substitution. The resulting hash function is called Whirlpool, and the underlying block cipher is called Anubis. I'm not aware of any use of Anubis outside of Whirlpool.
The Salsa/ChaCha families of stream ciphers and the Blake family of hash functions are all very similar to each other. They all use a very similar family of (unnamed) block ciphers internally that are twice the size of the desired output. They achieve non-invetibility by breaking the block cipher output into two halves and XORing the two halves together.
Before MD5 was broken, I did read briefly about an attempt (not by Ron Rivest) to use the inner block cipher from MD5 for encryption, but the performance wasn't competitive. Now we've characterized the hidden patterns in the block cipher well enough to break it relatively easily. I forget the name the authors retroactively gave to Rivest's inner block cipher from MD5.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't do this. On the other hand, do do this, but be aware of the tradeoffs. I hate telling people not to do something. Most people just end up not turning 2FA on at all. My approach has converted many people from "one password reused everywhere, at best with variations" to KeepassXC unique passwords everywhere + 2FA and I classify that as a big win. The biggest benefit of TOTP 2FA isn't the "second factor" part, i…
I grant that it protects against phishing, but I would cautiously suggest that sites that are smart enough to enable 2FA are smart enough to salt/hash/bcrypt/whatever best practice their passwords, so leaks are neutered. It doesn't not protect, so to speak, but the protection is likely to be redundant. But it emphatically does not protect against keylogging, anyone who can install a keylogger on your computer can gra…
1. A keylogger on your password db is useless if it does not also upload the db (at which point you're looking at a targeted attack, and you have far bigger problems than that).
2. Keyloggers are more and more often browser-based. KeepassXC is immune to those.
3. KeepassXC supports 2FA for the database encryption itself. If you're that paranoid, use that. There's always more you can do.
> And so, the responsible advice is to not use it.
No.
Just as you see in the article where Troy has to make the difficult decision not to include a "Do not put your password anywhere not even here" disclaimer, the same holds in my message: I weigh the pros of someone turning 2FA on as far more important than the cons that come with the less-than-ideal security 2FA adds.
Your advice keeps people from turning 2FA on. 2FA is a pain in the ass for most people.
You are one of the lucky few who understands the tradeoffs involved, as you yourself said. So use that knowledge of yours to actually get people to secure their accounts.
My goal isn't to keep Edward Snowden's accounts secure. It's to keep the bored HN user's account secure. The average HN user has medium-to-high technical literacy and low-to-medium security literacy. A lot of people on here reuse passwords, I'm sure. This is what I'm trying to fix, and I won't advise Ed to keep his TOTP seeds in the same database.