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The man who wrote the book on password management regrets the error
- m52go 9y agoFirst, in light of how they handled the Google memo... Screw Gizmodo. But regarding the article itself, seems to be a nothing-burger. Once upon a time, we favored shorter complex passwords. Now, we favor longer intuitive passwords. The end. EDIT: I see the link in OP is now a WSJ link. It was a Gizmodo link at first. Hence my comment.
- Jaruzel 9y agoThe Daily Mail coverage is worse... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4771194/The-man-responsible-passwords-says-advice-WRONG.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4771194/The-m... I now predict an uptick in people using 'correctbatteryhorsestaple' as their password...
- mcherm 9y ago> I now predict an uptick in people using 'correctbatteryhorsestaple' as their password... At least that's slightly better than "correcthorsebatterystaple" which appeared in the XKCD. The really funny part is that I automatically noticed this when reading your comment because I have "correcthorsebatterystaple" so fully committed to memory that I noticed when you deviated.
- Ajedi32 9y ago> I automatically noticed this when reading your comment because I have "correcthorsebatterystaple" so fully committed to memory that I noticed when you deviated. For me it was the opposite. My brain automatically read it as "correcthorsebatterystaple" despite what was written, just as it would with a small typo in a word.
- Jaruzel 9y agoAccidental deviation. What I wrote IS how I've remembered it apparently. Maybe because a battery horse makes more sense to me than a horse battery. Not sure. either way, I'll start using it as my password and see how long it takes to get pwned.
- marcosdumay 9y agoOh, but the cartoon has the battery connected into the horse :) What goes to show something, because most people discussing passphrases do not care to point that it's about mental images, not text. It's either so obvious that it doesn't have to be said, or so non-obvious that nobody gets it, even after reading the XKCD.
- al452 9y ago"The Daily Mail coverage is worse" It always is.
- Udik 9y agoI just wish websites would remind you of their password rules at login time. I use different passwords depending on what the password rules are, and you only get to see them at signup/ password recovery, which unfortunately tends to be quite often with certain websites or web apps.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rb808 9y agoAmen, with a special F.U. to the sites that disallow special characters. What is the reason for that? (OK I might understand disallowing some uncommon chars but $%(^ etc shouldn't be disallowed)
- darylfritz 9y agoWhy block anything at all? If I want my password to be unicode and emoji, what's the downside to the site? I assume they're hashing all the passwords anyway.
- feld 9y agohint: they're not all hashing the passwords
- jrimbault 9y agoI always wonder what kind of magic those websites do with the string. Hashing has become so simple. When you hash you don't have to worry about special chars (encoding issues though). It's only when you have bad practices that you should worry about ;") in the password field.
- jandrese 9y agoI wonder how many sites have been taking down by SQL injection attacks inside of a password. That would take something of a perfect storm of bad design, which is why I'm pretty sure there are sites out there that are vulnerable.
- stupidcar 9y agoSadly the "long passphrase" advice is also out of date. It relies on the naive idea that all password cracking is done brute-force, one character at a time. But all the huge leaks of password DBs over the past few years has given crackers a huge dataset to study and understand password generation behaviours, including how people come up with passphrases. Ars Technica did a long look at password cracking techniques[1] that covered stuff like this. The tl;dr is that any strategy short of full randomness is wrong. Either use a password manager, or use a set of dice, just make sure that your own human predictability cannot meaningfully affect the outcome. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/how-c...
- GlitchMr 9y agoThe long passphrase idea as suggested by xkcd is fine, provided you pick random words. For instance, a database of 2048 words, and a 4 word passphrase has 44 entropy (2^44 possible passwords). >>> log2(2048 ** 4) 44.0 Even if somebody knows the pattern they have 17 592 186 044 416 passwords to try. You can further increase number of passwords to try by increasing number of words. Probably with advances of technology 4 words may be somewhat unsecure in the future, but 5 words is 2048 times harder to crack than 4 words password, so it should be still secure. The article in question shows three word passwords being cracked, but please note that three words is 2048 times easier to crack than 4 words, and probably very feasible to crack using graphics cards (provided poor choice of algorithms like MD5).
- meitham 9y agoyou know what "correct horse battery stable" is now one of the popular passwords, just like "qwerty".
- arkitaip 9y ago... followed by "correct horse battery stable 1", "correct horse battery stable 11", "correct horse battery stable 111"
- feld 9y agothose passwords would probably be safe to use because the correct word is "staple"
- contravariant 9y agoActually a good cracker would probably catch a simple substitution like that as well.
- lousken 9y agoI think nowadays the bigger problem is that sites don't cooperate with password managers. I am trying to use 20character passwords and some sites still limit that number to 12 or 16. Also the fact that blizzard or steam doesn't use TOTP that google auth. uses pisses me off.
- arkitaip 9y agoI still find sites that only allow 20 chars of a-zA-Z0-9. It should be criminal.
- knz 9y ago20? Haha, I've seen a limit of 10 this year (for my garbage collection company).
- ramchip 9y agoMy bank (SMBC) requires exactly 4 digits for the online banking password...
- teamhappy 9y agoYeah, for some reason banks and credit card providers seem to be worse at this than anybody else.
- rodolphoarruda 9y agoMine requires 6 digits to get in, but then for every real transaction I have to inform another 6 digits from an RSA app installed on my phone.
- jandrese 9y agoMy bank used to do that. They finally switched to a fancy Web 2.0 interface a couple of years ago that let you use real passwords.
- THE_PUN_STOPS 9y ago
- pselbert 9y agoEvery time I participate in a security audit for some enterprise contract I have to explain and defend why we don't enforce complexity and rotation rules. Lately citing the NSA's change in position has been convincing enough and we don't get nearly as much push back.
- al452 9y agoYou mean NIST not NSA, right?
- dalbasal 9y agoThere are two examples of misunderstanding the human element here. One is that rotation and complexity rules lead to password spreadsheets and postit notes, a different kind of security issue. Another is that forcing someone to constantly defend and explain why something is the way it is, leads to that persona eventually implementing something that (even is worse), will attract fewer questions.
- ciro_langone 9y agoAre the little devices that change the PIN or passphrase every 30 seconds the most secure way to lock access? It seems like having to have the right code at the right time was more secure than having the right code at anytime, but I wasn't sure why they weren't rolled out en mass. Is this not the best method of security?
- Joeri 9y agoTOTP, the algorithm used by github, google, and many others to provide two-factor auth is basically that, except your phone is the little device. IMHO this is "good enough" security for normal people. I haven't read of cases where people's second factor got hacked, just where it got bypassed (e.g. by using social engineering to skip passwords entirely).
- jandrese 9y agoPeople say the weakest link is the user in passwords, and that's often true. But for more security conscious users the weakest link is the helpdesk. It may not even be where you expect. Plenty of people have been hacked because the hacker called the support line for their registrar, hosting, email provider, or ISP and got a password changed without any form of hard verification. It can be extremely frustrating to do everything right and then have your knees cut off by some script reader in a cube farm somewhere. Also, if you do email verification for accounts, whenever someone changes their email send one to the old account saying 'Hey, this is being changed, are you OK with it?" and if they say no, revert the email and reset the password on the spot.
- marcosdumay 9y agoFrom the point of view of somebody brute forcing their way in, there is very little difference between a password that stays the same and one that changes all the time. Those are great against key-loggers, not so against people that have insider info.
- princekolt 9y agoAt which point will we need to move to strictly external hardware authentication? I think that even with password managers, it can only go so far. At some point we will be synchronizing password files with dozens of MBs, and one day you will want to login to something and won't have access to your passwords. There has to be a way of building transparent AND strong authentication.
- tome 9y agoMy bank already has this (a little card reader that checks my debit card pin). Seems reasonable to assume this kind of tech could be used more widely.
- antisthenes 9y agoHopefully never, because hardware will always remain something you can physically lose. For certain people (myself included) that's a much bigger risk factor than getting your password manager db compromised. If I lose my keychain authenticator or what have you, I don't want to be stuck not being able to use any of my websites until a new one arrives.
- iamphilrae 9y agoThe main problem with this would be non-standardisation. For example, I have 4 bank accounts at 4 different banks and each has a different piece of hardware for 2FA. Imagine if you needed an individual key fob for every single online account you have. I'd love to be in a world where I click the website login button, I then type a simple pin into a key fob, then I plug the fob into a USB port, and it authenticates me. No password other than the pin. I'd also love it to just be a 'thing', not a way to just hack filling in a password field on a form.
- dhimes 9y agoI have an honest question about cracking passwords. Does the cracker know when they are getting close? I don't understand how they could, but every field has its experts and surprises so I thought I'd ask here. So if I have a hashed password, and I start a hashing a dictionary, will I know that I have, say, the [whatever the word is for iterations or depth of hashing] correct, before seeing exact matches with the hashed database? Is there, I don't know, some convergence of some statistical property of the output as I get closer?
- Malice 9y agoNo. You only know whether you have it correct or incorrect.
- dhimes 9y agoThank you.
- PeterisP 9y agoNo. In general, that depends on the hash function. Some hash functions have that property (e.g. you might want to use such a function for some internal data structure), but cryptographic hash functions must not. If you'd find some property where you could check if you're "getting close", then that would be a major flaw in that function - i.e., it's possible that SHA-3 has some way to do that, but as far as we know (and we've tried) it does not, and if it would be the case then that would be a good enough reason to stop using SHA-3 anywhere.
- dhimes 9y agoExcellent. Thank you.
- Xoros 9y agoYes in movies or tv shows they do when you see the decipher progression on screen :) But as stated by others no. Not trolling, I guess for people that don't know how it works it can be confusing.
- jameskegel 9y agoAnd here I am typing a small novel every time I want to unlock my crypt, feeling smug, when just now I realize that some day even my passphrases will become "not enough". This is a weird feeling- excitement for the future, but also fear
- marcosdumay 9y agoThey won't. If it's a random enough 7 words or more passphrase, it will only become "not enough" if the key generation algorithm is broken.
- traviswingo 9y agoNo paywall: http://archive.is/JNiVT http://archive.is/JNiVT
- Beltiras 9y agoLet's say that you have 26 tokens (english lower case alphabet) in your password policy. Let's also say that there is a cost incurred adding a token. How many letters would a password need to be for it to be more beneficial to add a token rather than add to the minimum length? 26^n > 27^(n-1) comes out to 88th letter providing less entropy than adding a token. The more reasonable alphabet is 52 letters (lower and upper case) and some tokens, let's say 12 tokens. 64^n > 65^(n-1) makes 269. Lesson to draw from this: always make your password longer, rather than more complicated.
- jandrese 9y agoOne thing I suggest to people these days is to instead make a passphrase where at least one of the words is an "English-like nonword". Something that sounds like a word but doesn't appear in the dictionary. People are pretty good at remembering things like that, and I find that most people can remember their passwords even a week later with this method. A sample password might be: "Zapagar, lightning chomper" Or maybe: "plodding! Sloimo can't 3lap" It's much easier to remember a password if it forms a little story in your head. Too many people try to optimize the "hard to guess" part of a password requirement without considering the "easy to remember" requirement. Typing long passwords isn't nearly as much of a hassle if it is full of normal words instead of insane garbage like L1ghtn1nG that computers can easily guess anyway. Length is the best defense.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoOh freddled gruntbuggly, Thy micturations are to me, As plurdled gabbleblotchits, On a lurgid bee, That mordiously hath blurted out, Its earted jurtles, grumbling Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer. [drowned out by moaning and screaming] Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles, Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts, And living glupules frart and stipulate, Like jowling meated liverslime, Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes, And hooptiously drangle me, With crinkly bindlewurdles,mashurbitries. Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, See if I don't!
- maccard 9y agoAll it takes is one website to poorly secure your credentials, and your password is exposed everywhere in this case. Use a password manager, and use the max length you can for that website.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoI think the software community has generally done a poor job with authN, authZ, and credential management. The Web Authentication working group is working on a new spec to tackle some of their problems issues [0], but it's still fairly young and it fails to address some common pain-points. It seems reasonable to distinguish between identity and device. If I lose some device, I can publish its revocation. Serious internet users will have dozens, if not hundreds, of accounts. How do we handle revocations and key rotation?
- teddyh 9y agoThe logic of passwords is simple, once you realize that all humans are terrible random number generators. When you allow any part of your password to be chosen by a human, i.e. yourself, you have to assume that the human-chosen part is known to an attacker. The solution is to generate passwords with enough random bits to satisfy current demands. And by generate I of course mean to allow a real number generator (either a computer, or dice, or anything really random; i.e. something a casino would accept) to choose the password for you. Without any restrictions except a desire to minimize length, you get the classic unmemorable 0vT2GVlncZ4pZ0Ps-style passwords. If you add the restriction “must be a sequence of english words”, you get xkcd-style “correct horse battery staple” passwords. Both are fine, since they contain enough randomness not generated by a human. But if you yourself choose, either old-style “Tr0ub4dor&3” or passphrase “now is the time for all good men”-style, you have utterly lost, since nothing has been randomly chosen, and “What one man can invent, another can discover.”. Note: this also applies if you run a password generator and choose a generated one that you like. Since you have introduced choice, you have tainted the process, and your password now follows an unknown number of intuitive rules (for instance, there was a story here on HN the other day about how people prefer the letters in their own name over other letters of the alphabet), and these rules can be exploited by an attacker.
- mcbruiser3 9y agoa) 2FA or b) use the "forgot my password" option every time