> I see multiple, severe problems with this old question from 2008 and I am tempted to delete it outright -- primarily because the most highly voted answers read more like blog rants than actual "answers". http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/95172/old-problemati...
The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#32I'm normally highly sceptical of anything which is essentially a how to guide on security of, well, anything but I have to say whoever this author is they absolutely know their stuff. Normally security advice is just 1980s circle-jerking of the same meaningless "sound good" concepts (e.g. "At least one upper-case, number, special character") but actually, no, not in this case. Instead he is giving advice which is mod…
http://stackoverflow.com/posts/477578/revisions
The power of team work.
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#33Regarding website authentication, I've been looking for some feedback on a new auth scheme. Instead of using a standard password (all characters are allowed, min 5 characters, common passwords not allowed), you're able to login with a 4 digit passcode. I know someone just cringed at that thought, but the idea centralizes around improving user experience on the website. First, all normal precautions would be taken (no…
Sorry, nothing personal. But this 'new' approach feels like last decade online banking - and it wasn't a good idea at that point. In addition: Limiting user input and forcing password resets is, in my world, directly acting against your idea of 'improving user experience'. If I am allowed to use a password of my choosing, I'll probably come up with something that is memorable and reasonably secure (depending on the c…
What if the user was to authenticate once via SMS (we send them a code and they enter it within a reasonable time period), and once they do, they're authenticated for an infinite amount of time. This way they don't need to remember a passcode, and just need to have their phone on them when accessing the website from a new computer - a similar experience to two factor auth.
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#34Why do maximum security sites always disable auto-complete for username and password? That seems less secure to me. If I always have to type in my password, chances are that I'll choose a password that can be easily remembered or I'll be forced to write it down somewhere. (Personally, I use plugins to get around this anyway. My computer, my rules.)
Because they think they are the centre of the universe. Theirs is the only site that matters, and is the only one they work on, so why would anything else matter?
Thankfully a Chrome plugin turns autocomplete back on for me. But there are still some sites that go out of their way to ensure that they still won't work. For example my doctor's site is some sort of third party abomination that would have looked "cool" ten years ago and requires me opening my password safe every time. Even Google pulls some stunts on some of their authentication pages preventing autofill.
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#35Why do maximum security sites always disable auto-complete for username and password? That seems less secure to me. If I always have to type in my password, chances are that I'll choose a password that can be easily remembered or I'll be forced to write it down somewhere. (Personally, I use plugins to get around this anyway. My computer, my rules.)
Probably to prevent people accidentally saving a login on a shared/public computer.
The subset of computers in between "people I don't trust also use this computer" and "this computer could easily have had a key logger Or root kit installed" must be vanishingly small.
If you don't own it (or trust the person who owns it enough to satisfy your personal security requirements), then any username/password you type into it should be considered "possibly compromised" no matter what measures the website has taken to protect you. Two factor auth helps, but still have the problem that 2/3rds of your auth credentials could be compromised (the attacker could end up knowing your gmail username & password, leaving only the six digit auth-code to brute force, which I _hope_ google have sensible protection in place for). Single use passwords also help, but both tfa and single use passwords don't protect against an attacker who 0wns the machine seeing and recording everything that happens in your current session - including I suspect for a sufficiently skilled attacker (or perhaps even a script kiddie with an off the shelf tool), complete access to the post SSL decrypted data inside a trojaned browser (if I can modify the browser, none of the httponly or secureonly flags for your session cookies are safe, sure, JavaScript can't extract them, but the browser code can… And it could be exporting them in real time to the bad guy, or piggybacking proxied instructions to empty your bank account via Western Union while you check your credit card balance)
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#36Isn't this sort of security something we wish we didn't have to learn? And for people who don't take the time maybe it's best to let a third-party handle it.
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#37it's mostly good. NIST abolished their algo for pasword entropy estimation some time ago. i do not much like any password strength tests, most of which rate any number of terrible passwords as strong. as such i think they give a false sense of security. maybe consider cracklib. as DenisM said, always use SSL for all traffic if security matters and don't trust SO for security advice.
The only really useful password strength test would be one that said "A stock Thinkpad would be able to brute force this password in $x hours and $y minutes." Might make people think twice about that six character password.
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#38Why do maximum security sites always disable auto-complete for username and password? That seems less secure to me. If I always have to type in my password, chances are that I'll choose a password that can be easily remembered or I'll be forced to write it down somewhere. (Personally, I use plugins to get around this anyway. My computer, my rules.)
Agreed that a lack of autocomplete is annoying. A savvy user can also circumvent this by using a browser plugin such as GreaseMonkey to force-fill whatever fields they want. I guess the assumption is that such a user will also be savvy enough to safe-guard their password.
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#39Regarding website authentication, I've been looking for some feedback on a new auth scheme. Instead of using a standard password (all characters are allowed, min 5 characters, common passwords not allowed), you're able to login with a 4 digit passcode. I know someone just cringed at that thought, but the idea centralizes around improving user experience on the website. First, all normal precautions would be taken (no…
Was it Twitter who had their domain hijacked by someone ringing up the right telco and saying something like "my cell pone is out of action temporarily, can you please forward all calls/messages to this other number?" in a sufficiently convincing fashion to some minimum wage telco support staff, then getting a two factor auth token sent to an attacker controlled number?
I think a lot of webdevs make assumptions about SMS "security" that are quite unfounded.
Re: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably to prevent people accidentally saving a login on a shared/public computer.
The curious thing about this "solution" is that it's pretty fundamentally broken. If you're authenticating to any important site by typing a username/password into a computer you don't "trust", you're doing it wrong. The subset of computers in between "people I don't trust also use this computer" and "this computer could easily have had a key logger Or root kit installed" must be vanishingly small. If you don't own i…