4 ms·

>Your grandmother, doctor, etc are not aware they can use a password manager with a master password such as "dandy-pencil-colonist-precise-populate-stardom" Th

• Fnoord 8y ago
  > They are. My grandmother in particular cannot handle such a thing. At all. This exactly the sort of dismissive tech myopia that comes from people who get too deep into the tech trenches and lose sight of huge swaths of the general population. It's very easy to take for granted the huge amounts of meta knowledge and mental models of abstract systems people like us possess. With those as frameworks lots of things make total sense that are utterly confusing to those without them, even ignoring sensory trouble. The advantage of using a sentence as password is that it is easy to remember. The advantage of using a password manager is that you only need to remember one strong password. The strong password can be remembered as a picture (like correct horse battery staple) which is a very strong way to remember anything. Tricks like paintings and books can be used instead of sticky notes. With touchID and faceID an adversary can force you to cooperate, and they also have false positives. IIRC with FaceID it was 1 in 1.000.000. TouchID weaker. Non-Apple implementations likely even weaker. It takes longer to break said password with full knowledge (53 bit entropy). It didn't even have fancy things such as capitals or different separators. Plus, I never said I only use a password; I use 2FA. A YubiKey with TOTP or whatever can be revoked. The government doesn't have a copy of it, it isn't stored in my ID card either. It is mine, and mine only. > Really? Seems a lot easier: there that person is hunting and pecking (you don't think touch typing even is universal do you?) in public, hard of hearing and totally focused on that, while someone else stands behind them and just watches. Even assuming there are no cameras looking down of any kind around of course. Using words like you suggest makes it even easier, if you know each section is a real word then even missing parts will make it easy to fill in the blanks, heck just hearing it would be plenty to narrow the search space. Or how about using WiFi transmissions directly to recognize keystrokes ("Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals": https://www.sigmobile.org/mobicom/2015/papers/p90-aliA.pdf https://www.sigmobile.org/mobicom/2015/papers/p90-aliA.pdf )? TEMPEST and such is a different problem. I don't recommend WLAN in secure environments. Cameras are a reason why I recommend 2FA. > That's why we read all the time about the vast gangs using harvested finger prints and 3D face scans to unlock iPhones, but have never read about shitty PINs getting brute forced or people reusing passwords or password reset mechanisms getting abused because people forget them all the time or password databases getting leaked or...? Yeah, passwords are certainly the best! We've read about fingerprint identification and facial recognition being cracked. It isn't a matter when touchID and faceID are cracked; the question is when. The password I mentioned, if inputted securely, has high enough entropy to remain secure longer than touchID and faceID are. PIN has very weak entropy, and using your password in public is a bad idea. > Right back at you. Your comment comes across as a typically dismissive, smug put down of the needs and requirements of large portions of the our fellow humans who do amazing things but just not in our specialty. And it's an attitude that has actively harmed security. You are projecting.
  • xoa 8y ago
    >The advantage of using a sentence as password is that it is easy to remember No, a long random sentence is not necessarily easy to remember, nor necessarily enter correctly or quickly. It might be easier for many people to remember sure, but there are also plenty of people who just plain have memory problems period. >The advantage of using a password manager is that you only need to remember one strong password. Preaching the choir here. I switched over to religiously using Keychain Access, requiring careful manual entry and reentry of everything, back around Mac OS X 10.3 IIRC. Looking at my primary keychain right now the earliest entry I still have saved is from June 2004. I have pushed them ever since, though with I'll note that with some irony there has long been pushback against it of the exact same type you're doing by those arguing that keeping it all in one's head is "more secure". But even though they've gotten far more convenient and automated I tell you right now from significant teaching experience that they still encompass a mental model that does not come naturally to many people. Hopefully they'll be rendered obsolete along with public passwords in general sooner rather then later. >With touchID and faceID an adversary can force you to cooperate They can with a password too, there is no difference here at all. It is also equally a non-issue for most people's threat models. Active in person physical threats are outside of nearly any widely deployed system right now, though Apple has the foundations in place to do more if they ever decide to. >false positives Too low an issue to be relevant given hardware restricted retries and comparative advantage vs PINs. >53 bit entropy Are you trying to make a joke here? You seriously think most people will be using high entropy passwords every single time they want to access their phones? Their watches? Or even computers for that matter, what makes that work in general is that it's a relatively rare operation amortized over long sessions, not constant. Lots of people didn't even like the friction of using a 4-digit PIN. Biometric shortcuts for general usage is precisely what has made longer master passwords more feasible for more people. >TEMPEST and such is a different problem. What I described isn't TEMPEST, and at any rate it's not a different problem at all, it's part of the same threat scenario. That's the point. Biometrics can be at least as resistant, or more so, to passive compromise. >I don't recommend WLAN in secure environments. Secure environments are not where most people are using devices. A "security" system that doesn't deal with the realities of usage is a shitty system. >Cameras are a reason why I recommend 2FA. Biometrics + physical token is 2FA. >We've read about fingerprint identification and facial recognition being cracked. No, we've read about them being "cracked" as in somebody in a lab managed with some level of resources and directed effort to manage to trick a system some percentage of the time (make sure to read the fine print on number of tries it took for example). But security is always an economic equation, so this is only useful in context of threat scenarios and protection & usage value ratios. >and using your password in public is a bad idea Haha what, then what the heck have you even been going on about this whole time? Are you saying that people just shouldn't use their powerful packed full of private information and payment access and all sorts of other stuff computing devices in public at all? Because they will (and should be able to!). A real security system needs to handle that.