5 ms·

Passwords are a lost cause. This doesn't mean that you need to give up on using good practices, just don't go overboard trying to plug all the theoretical holes

by xaduha 5y ago

Passwords are a lost cause. This doesn't mean that you need to give up on using good practices, just don't go overboard trying to plug all the theoretical holes. It's not all or nothing, sometimes it's OK to be good enough. For everything important you oughta use 2FA anyway.

KronisLV 5y ago
> Passwords are a lost cause. I never really understood this. Ed25519 keys use SHA-512 and are considered secure. They're still just long secrets, aren't they? What's to prevent me from using a similarly long, randomly generated secret as my password, using a different one for every site? Because that's what I'm doing with KeePass. Backing up the auth database/file and having enough redundancy in place, as well as having a sufficiently secure master password take some effort, but the rest is just copying and pasting those long secrets when you want to log in. Of course, 2FA is a necessity for everything important as well, but it feels to me like the kinds of passwords that many people use are the problem, not the concept of passwords.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  There is a difference between passwords and certificates: you have to send the password over the network every time you login, whereas the private key is never shared. But in general I agree with the rest of your comment.
- xaduha 5y ago
  Don't cherry pick, read the rest of my comment. It wasn't at all about any individual password complexity, it was about password managers that work with browsers in context of the blog post. Out of curiosity, what does haveibeenpwned.com say about your most used email?
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    > Don't cherry pick, read the rest of my comment. It wasn't at all about any individual password complexity, it was about password managers that work with browsers in context of the blog post. That's fair, but the aim of my response was to have a short discussion about the idea behind passwords and the fact that they're sent over the network, maybe someone has any input on that and why that's still such a popular approach. As for the exact topic of the post, password managers within browsers feel too limiting as opposed to standalone software like KeePass, which can be used for desktop applications, servers (including certificate storage) and anything else, really. But talking about that wasn't my goal. > Out of curiosity, what does haveibeenpwned.com say about your most used email? "Good news — no pwnage found!" Mostly due to using about 10 different e-mails for different purposes and throwaways for questionable sites.
    - xaduha 5y ago
      If you're copy-pasting passwords as you mentioned you've already lost 'theoretical hole' game. Everything that has any sort of basic privileges on your machine can read a clipboard as soon as you put something there. > But talking about that wasn't my goal. Too bad, because passwords managers in browsers are the end of the line as passwords go. Vast majority of people wouldn't be copy pasting passwords, not because it's different kind of less secure, but because it's not convenient. Passwords are inherently flawed or they wouldn't be what we call passwords. You're trying to solve something that is already solved with 2FA, passwords just need to be there as a bare minimum that should't be considered secure by itself no matter how complex any of them they are.
      - KronisLV 5y ago
        That is a fair point! Yet it's sad that we live in a world where our apps aren't sandboxed properly and where we have to worry about our own devices being compromised. However, 2FA really is one of the few solutions that could work here, unless the method used can also be compromised.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  The difference is that you're never entrusting the authenticating party with any secret. Even if their entire full-cleartext database leaks, an attacker could not even authenticate against that _same_ site.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  > I never really understood this. Ed25519 keys use SHA-512 and are considered secure. They're still just long secrets, aren't they? No. I find it easiest to keep this straight in my head with a line from the U2 song "The Fly", "a secret is something you tell one other person". You're thinking of Ed25519 private keys, you mustn't tell those to anybody and they're minted as a pair with a public key you can tell to everybody. > What's to prevent me from using a similarly long, randomly generated secret as my password That's a Shared Secret. You tell the password to the remote web site. They have a copy of it, their permanent copy of it is likely hashed, but you send them a new, unhashed version of that same password to the site every single time you log in. This makes all the difference in the world. Let's see that in action: Suppose that Edward, who is Evil, has complete insight into everything stored by and every program running at Facebook for an hour. If someone logs into Facebook using a password, obviously Edward learns the password, it was sent to Facebook so they could check it was correct. So Edward can log in as any Facebook user who logged in while Edward's magical insight lasted? Right? Nope. Facebook has WebAuthn. For WebAuthn users logging in involves public key cryptography. Facebook has a public key for those users but no private key. Edward can see that the users were properly authenticated, but he doesn't get a persistent credential because the persistent credential never left the user's grasp. He cannot log in as those users, only they can do that.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    Overall I agree, but couldn't Edward steal the users' Facebook cookies regardless of WebAuthn? I think those last until the user clicks logout, so many of them will last forever. Additionally, Edward can steal the cookies of every user using Facebook for that hour. But he can only steal the passwords of a small fraction of those users, because only a small fraction will start a new session; most users will use existing sessions (because the cookies last forever).
    - dandarie 5y ago
      Yes, he can steal the cookies and new passwords, but still won't have access to user accounts and/or passwords for more than an hour. So, after Edward is discovered, all sessions are remotely logged off and all accounts created during that hour are blocked, asked to confirm their email, phone or even identity, or deleted. So, after one hour, Edward is left with nothing more than braggable rights. And personal data of billions, but not their passwords.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
One half of 2FA is a password.... saying 1/2 of that is a lost cause is stupid. Passwords are great, because they're in your head and can be changed at will (unlike biometrics), and phishing 2fa from (eg old people) is not any harder than phishing for a password.

by xaduha 5y ago

KronisLV 5y ago

> Passwords are a lost cause. I never really understood this. Ed25519 keys use SHA-512 and are considered secure. They're still just long secrets, aren't they? What's to prevent me from using a similarly long, randomly generated secret as my password, using a different one for every site? Because that's what I'm doing with KeePass. Backing up the auth database/file and having enough redundancy in place, as well as having a sufficiently secure master password take some effort, but the rest is just copying and pasting those long secrets when you want to log in. Of course, 2FA is a necessity for everything important as well, but it feels to me like the kinds of passwords that many people use are the problem, not the concept of passwords.

nicoburns 5y ago
There is a difference between passwords and certificates: you have to send the password over the network every time you login, whereas the private key is never shared. But in general I agree with the rest of your comment.
xaduha 5y ago
Don't cherry pick, read the rest of my comment. It wasn't at all about any individual password complexity, it was about password managers that work with browsers in context of the blog post. Out of curiosity, what does haveibeenpwned.com say about your most used email?
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > Don't cherry pick, read the rest of my comment. It wasn't at all about any individual password complexity, it was about password managers that work with browsers in context of the blog post. That's fair, but the aim of my response was to have a short discussion about the idea behind passwords and the fact that they're sent over the network, maybe someone has any input on that and why that's still such a popular approach. As for the exact topic of the post, password managers within browsers feel too limiting as opposed to standalone software like KeePass, which can be used for desktop applications, servers (including certificate storage) and anything else, really. But talking about that wasn't my goal. > Out of curiosity, what does haveibeenpwned.com say about your most used email? "Good news — no pwnage found!" Mostly due to using about 10 different e-mails for different purposes and throwaways for questionable sites.
  - xaduha 5y ago
    If you're copy-pasting passwords as you mentioned you've already lost 'theoretical hole' game. Everything that has any sort of basic privileges on your machine can read a clipboard as soon as you put something there. > But talking about that wasn't my goal. Too bad, because passwords managers in browsers are the end of the line as passwords go. Vast majority of people wouldn't be copy pasting passwords, not because it's different kind of less secure, but because it's not convenient. Passwords are inherently flawed or they wouldn't be what we call passwords. You're trying to solve something that is already solved with 2FA, passwords just need to be there as a bare minimum that should't be considered secure by itself no matter how complex any of them they are.
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      That is a fair point! Yet it's sad that we live in a world where our apps aren't sandboxed properly and where we have to worry about our own devices being compromised. However, 2FA really is one of the few solutions that could work here, unless the method used can also be compromised.
sascha_sl 5y ago
The difference is that you're never entrusting the authenticating party with any secret. Even if their entire full-cleartext database leaks, an attacker could not even authenticate against that _same_ site.
tialaramex 5y ago
> I never really understood this. Ed25519 keys use SHA-512 and are considered secure. They're still just long secrets, aren't they? No. I find it easiest to keep this straight in my head with a line from the U2 song "The Fly", "a secret is something you tell one other person". You're thinking of Ed25519 private keys, you mustn't tell those to anybody and they're minted as a pair with a public key you can tell to everybody. > What's to prevent me from using a similarly long, randomly generated secret as my password That's a Shared Secret. You tell the password to the remote web site. They have a copy of it, their permanent copy of it is likely hashed, but you send them a new, unhashed version of that same password to the site every single time you log in. This makes all the difference in the world. Let's see that in action: Suppose that Edward, who is Evil, has complete insight into everything stored by and every program running at Facebook for an hour. If someone logs into Facebook using a password, obviously Edward learns the password, it was sent to Facebook so they could check it was correct. So Edward can log in as any Facebook user who logged in while Edward's magical insight lasted? Right? Nope. Facebook has WebAuthn. For WebAuthn users logging in involves public key cryptography. Facebook has a public key for those users but no private key. Edward can see that the users were properly authenticated, but he doesn't get a persistent credential because the persistent credential never left the user's grasp. He cannot log in as those users, only they can do that.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  Overall I agree, but couldn't Edward steal the users' Facebook cookies regardless of WebAuthn? I think those last until the user clicks logout, so many of them will last forever. Additionally, Edward can steal the cookies of every user using Facebook for that hour. But he can only steal the passwords of a small fraction of those users, because only a small fraction will start a new session; most users will use existing sessions (because the cookies last forever).
  - dandarie 5y ago
    Yes, he can steal the cookies and new passwords, but still won't have access to user accounts and/or passwords for more than an hour. So, after Edward is discovered, all sessions are remotely logged off and all accounts created during that hour are blocked, asked to confirm their email, phone or even identity, or deleted. So, after one hour, Edward is left with nothing more than braggable rights. And personal data of billions, but not their passwords.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

One half of 2FA is a password.... saying 1/2 of that is a lost cause is stupid. Passwords are great, because they're in your head and can be changed at will (unlike biometrics), and phishing 2fa from (eg old people) is not any harder than phishing for a password.